


the sheer force of sky and the stone magnet earth

by iniquiticity



Category: American Revolution RPF
Genre: Alienation, Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Magic, Canon Era, Gen, Strained Friendships, The Mysterious Past
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2019-06-10 09:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 49,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15288999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iniquiticity/pseuds/iniquiticity
Summary: A strange night has strange effects on Alexander Hamilton. A quest for answers about shocking discoveries ensues; like most quests, not all the answers are the ones anyone wants to hear, and the solutions to problems are impossible to predict.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> here is what i think will be a long-ish fic. i am actually not sure how shippy it will be, but i **do** have a pretty good record on finishing longfics. mostly, it will be dialogue. characters and tags will be added as the story progresses. 
> 
> thanks to chy + nim for their help.
> 
> As always, you can find me on tumblr at [iniquiticity](http://iniquiticity.tumblr.com), or on twitter at [@picklesnake](https://twitter.com/picklesnake).

*****

Alexander did not see the shift that caused him to wake, but he felt it, in a way that he had never felt anything before.

At first he was sure he thought it had been a noise, because it seemed absurd to be woken by a sense. He, like the rest of the aides and the army,  
entertained stories of witches and magic spells and hexes, some he believed more than others. As far as the army went, he felt slightly to the disbelieving side, but it was a comforting thought to imagine perhaps someone or something could open a hole in the world under General Howe and have the man teleported back to England. Sometimes, when he believed more than others, he thought of a half-remembered story his mother told him about the books they shared, and the seriousness of her promise that they would return to him. 

(The books had, impossibly. They had not been teleported into his care, no. But they had been given back to him when it seemed impossible they would.) 

Even so, all of that had been back on the island. But during the war, for him to be awoken by a sense, when there was a permanent confusion and panic due to all their failings, even if they had succeeded more these days --

He closed his eyes and tried to back to sleep.

The sense came again, rattling under his skin and reminding him how it felt in his blood, to think about the island, and the ocean waves. It had not been a noise, he was sure. He felt it inside him. Furthermore John was still asleep, and Tench, and the rest of the room. 

Outside, Alexander saw the bright moon and heard the sounds of camp. Different from the sense, he was sure. He wiggled around his bedmates and was unsure, for a puzzling moment, whether he stood on the wood slats of the floor or of the slave port back at St. Croix. A brief admonition to himself, and then he reached for his pistol. 

No, it was not the right weapon for the moment. He set it down. He reached for his sabre, and that one was wrong as well. He reached for his pen and it was at least closer to the correct defense. He dipped it in ink and let it drip as he followed the sense like a pull in his chest, taking a step and pulling back when it did not increase. He walked down the hallway of their present headquarters, one hand against the wall to help guide him, letting the different texture of the doors to the other rooms slide under his fingers. He barely heard the camp. What he felt - and that was so much more important than hearing - was stillness that encompassed him like gooseflesh, not just on his skin but on his heart, prickling across his lungs, through his airways. 

Had the others been given some whiskey to drink, to pretend they could not feel it? Did they not sense how they were gripped by air made form? 

He stepped outside. The sense was more now, starting from the grass under his bare feet and reaching through his flesh like water through cloth. Impossible hands gripped his bones. Unfamiliar silence poured from the moon. He felt August humidity in his throat despite the May weather, felt the muddy sand between his bare toes and heard the shouting of the docks and the crack of the whip and the persistent, horrible moan of human cargo. 

He staggered, and the clouds pressed down on him like fever. He often pretended not to see the corpses floating in the ocean, but they took a while to sink, and his eye caught their action in the waves -- 

Iron links wrapped around his stomach, squeezing his dinner back up. He felt but did not hear the retch, a wave splashing against his face, replacing his air with ocean water. Instead of silence, there was the sound of the carts and loud steps of plantation royalty. Perhaps it had been one of them that had knocked him to the ground, or it had been a dive to get out of the way of a carriage. Somehow, everyone on the dock could see every hidden bit of him. They saw his bastard youth and his mother and Ned and fever and hanging and the clerkship and the storm and the plea and he had never been so _seen_ \---

“Be still, Hamilton.” 

He struggled to look up at the sound of his name, and when he did, a cool, solid hand brushed over his face and welded his eyelids shut. 

“Hmm,” the world outside said, in a deep, familiar rumble. A finger drew down the center of his forehead, over ridge of his nose and to the peak of his chin. 

“Hmm,” the world said again, and then opened his eyelids as if they had not previously been sealed. 

It was the general. The general had a name, of course, and one that he knew, but somehow it no longer seemed to fit it. Names were so limiting. Hamilton. Faucette. 

The general did not seem to be bothered by the ocean storm, or the clank of chains, or the dismal cacophony of slave ships, or the crack of the whip. 

The general went, “Ah,” and then touched a finger to his own tongue before touching one of Alexander’s ears, and then the other. The general pushed him in that sense way, with no hands or real force. 

They were in New Jersey. They were in New Jersey in May, and he was in America. 

“Sir,” he said, out of habit, in a strangled voice. Where had it all come from? He _had_ heard the cries, and felt the ocean waves, and the pressure of stares --

“You never cease to surprise me,” the general said, “Did I wake you?” 

Without waiting for an answer, the general plucked the pen from his hand and tasted the ink on it with the tip of his tongue. Then he cast the pen aside and pressed the whole of his palm (oddly firm, like stone) to Alexander’s forehead, as if to take his temperature. 

Alexander thought of the books that his mother promised would return to him. He thought of how strange the food tasted, sometimes. He thought of when she had the silvery look in her eye, that he loved. Sometimes, if he woke in the middle of the night and opened the door to the kitchen a bit, he saw her so silver it was like she was made entirely of moonlight.

“I see,” the general said, and pulled his hand away, “I do think that is a conversation we should have, but it would be ill-advised to do so now. You must rest. You have done enough to challenge yourself this evening.” 

“Yes, sir,” he said, because that was all he could think to say. It would be impossible to comment on how the general seemed even more stone than usual, eyes glittering obsidian, jacket hewn from onyx. A long shadow, like the train of a gown, sprawled behind him. 

“Go to bed, Hamilton,” Washington said, and gestured back towards headquarters. The journey seemed impossibly far, as if he had woken up back on the islands and was required to walk through the ocean. To do so would require a journey through a strange cavern, with holes in the ceiling that allowed threads of moonlight to poke through.

He could do nothing else.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He could not decide whether it was better or worse that Washington looked, at present, completely normal. His clothes were familiar buff and blue, with brass buttons. His face was worn. He was obviously and clearly not made of stone. Even then, Alexander found it hard to doubt what he’d seen.

*

When he woke up, he was sore. 

It was as if he had laid on the ground, and carts had run over him for a few hours, and then after he was sufficiently tenderized, he was tossed into the Schuylkill for a good cold swim. 

He groaned, and threw an arm over his face to shelter him from the bright sunlight. His head was the only part of him that did not ache, save for a line of a hum down the center of his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He could ignore that easy, when compared to everything else. 

It was bright. Noon-like, honestly, and for a few moments he wondered if they were being attacked, because how else could he be lying here. It couldn’t be that. There was only the regular bustle of the war, no muskets or gunshots or screams. Not even the sleeping groans of his various roommates. Incredible, how much discomfort alone the sun could bring you --

\-- If he was not being attacked, how could it be so bright and he still in bed? 

He dragged himself into a sitting position and squinted at a wall. There was definitely daylight outside, and in great quantity. Had he not been summoned? Had he not been woken by the bell? Had none of the other aides shook him until he pulled himself up? The general would need him for something, as he always did. 

There was always so much to do, and despite his aches, he could not just be languishing around. What tasks did His Excellency currently possessed that went undone due to his delinquency? 

He hauled himself to his feet and dressed. He reached for his pen and it was not in the regular spot. He stared at the empty place, for a moment. Where was his pen? 

He had taken it after he’d woken up lat night. What could have possessed him to do so? What befuddlement did one have to come under to put down your pistol and pick up your quill to defend yourself? Did some brainless half of him think his pen could defend himself against a strange, dark-carved general? 

Washington. He had been outside. He had been -- 

It could not have been him, stone-like. But no one was like Washington, and that talking statue had been. Had he dreamed it? He was fairly certain that he had not, and yet how could it have been real, to feel so much like home?

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. No pen, and he was still delinquent. He went downstairs, trying to settle his thoughts. 

“And here his highness and seemed fit to bless us with his noonday presence!” John said, in his most announcing voice, looking up from the missive he was copying. “What has possessed such noble blood to consort among such lowlifes?” 

“Perhaps he was not brought his bedside snack, and comes to punish us,” Tench added, and John snickered. 

“It is only for his afternoon constitutional, young men,” Robert replied, grinning, “Think not that he comes to truly see us. he will return to his royal chambers afterwards.”

“Has everyone had their fun now?” he snapped, dropping into his chair. His stack of papers seemed less approachable than normal, when so much was already on his mind. The aches did not improve his mood. “Or is there a requirement for more of this abu--” 

HIs pen was returned to his desk. He stared at it for a moment or two. He was sure he had not left it there. The general had plucked it from his hand earlier that day and then cast it aside. 

“More what?” John asked, and there was a note of confusion. 

“More what?” He repeated, and this time John frowned at him, and so did Tench, and also Robert. He found the thread of the thought. “More abuse, of course.”

“Are you oversleeping because you are ill?” Tench asked, coming over from his desk and sizing him up, “The general was explicit that you were not to be woken by any of us, this morning.” 

“No worse than any other soldier,” he replied, and there was truth to it, in some way. Why did it seem so impossible, that Washington had simply put the pen back in his stand? He could not shake the feeling it had returned there on the back of a fairy or something sufficiently nonsensical. Then again, perhaps it was no longer so odd, given what he was sure he had seen. Somehow it seemed a lot more ridiculous than the ocean had felt on his calves, and more impossible than him hearing the sound of the whip. 

“Hamilton.” 

They all saluted, and Tench and John put themselves back at their desks. Alexander stood, trying to forget how strong the sense had been. The heat there was different than the heat here, and that heat had been the heat of the island. He had left that island, and still it had come to him. It had come to him, and a talking statue carved into the form of General Washington had rescued him, somehow. 

He could not decide whether it was better or worse that Washington looked, at present, completely normal. His clothes were familiar buff and blue, with brass buttons. His face was worn. He was obviously and clearly not made of stone. Even then, Alexander found it hard to doubt what he’d seen last night.

It had to wait. His present concern had to be the fact that the general had let him sleep, and he knew quite well Washington disliked little more than laziness. 

“Sir,” Alexander said, ignoring the pain that shot through his back at his salute. “My apologies for my tardiness. It should not require my brothers to awake me. If there are ways I can continue to express my devotion to the cause, please let me know. I would hurry in a way to atone in a way of your choosing.” 

Washington nodded. “Come with me,” he said, and turned from the room. 

Alexander did not need to look over his shoulder to imagine the half-smug, half-concerned looks of his colleagues. He hurried up to fall into step behind Washington, who stilled outside the headquarters, looked up at the sky, then down at the green grass, and then at him. 

Washington’s guard did not appear. In fact, no one seemed to see them at all: no soldiers picked themselves out of slouches, or saluted; no messengers rushed to bother him with letters; no whispers stopped or started at his presence. Rather than be forced to fend of the attention he always ratioed, the general simply walked around the main headquarters, not unlike they had done the previous night, and stood in the shadow of the building. Despite the strangeness of all that had happened, it was still peculiar and unsettling to be alone with the general, and yet, here they were, in the middle of the day, standing behind a building like two lovers in tryst. 

Washington studied him and the building, and then took another step, and gestured him forward. Alexander glanced around, taking in the whitewashed planks of the house, and spring grasses, and the little stones on the ground. Despite his interest in all the strangeness, he was not able to completely hide his confusion. 

“I imagine you are feeling quite sore,” Washington said, turning finally to look at him. He reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled out a small black stone, so smooth it looked like it had been pulled from a riverbed. “You arrived underprepared and nonetheless overcame a great trial.” 

“Yes, sir,” he said, even though he had intended to deflect. Furthermore, the questions he wished to pepper the general with seemed to not make it from his mind to his throat, even though their alone silence gave him unfamiliar space to ask them. 

“I suppose I should not be so surprised, given the uniqueness of your general self, and the vast number of your impressive talents.” Washington rolled the stone over in his hand as he spoke, only now turning to look at him. “Have you only now decided to combat it? Did you see me even prior to that?” 

“Your Excellency,” he began, looking for a while at the black stone in the man’s hand, and then up at his face, “What has happened to you, and what has happened to me?”

Washington quirked an eyebrow. “Have you suddenly noticed my peculiarity? We have known each other for some time.” The general was confused, and that make Alexander confused as well. He repeated the words in his mind. _Suddenly noticed?_ So then…. 

“You mean to say, sir, that you have always been made of stone? Or that you have always allowed the army to permit you a moment of your own time, and have simply decided against it for most times?”

“So it is new to you, then.” Washington pulled his hands behind his back, stone between them. A small frown worked his way across his face. “That is very interesting, and quite unusual, although again, I know few less unusual than you.” 

The general waited a moment, and then he turned to face Alexander fully, and held out his hand, the stone in the center of it. Alexander found it more challenging than usual to read his face; he wondered if this was how other people felt,when they met the general. Then, with a mix of excitement and hesitation, he took the stone and put it in his pocket. It was lighter than it looked, and cool to the touch.

“You could come to great harm, if you investigate these changes with your usual vigor. Given that, I think it not unwise to provide a little context, if this truly is a permanent change for you. As for the private moment…” His eyes glinted, not quite a grin, “It can be done, though there is no reason to do so in excess. The army is, after all, my most significant priority at this time, and there is no reason to hide myself from them, when they need me so desperately.” A beat. “You should return to work, and not let this distract you. If you wake this evening, remember to take that with you.” 

At this, Alexander could not restrain a surprised laugh. “You do not think I can stumble upon something so impossible, and put it side to write reports to Congress.”

Washington frowned. “I hope you do not mean to imply that all this new strangeness will decrease your devotion to the cause. Your unique and innumerable talents are critical to our success. The army needs your focus.”

“If I work today, you will tell me more about all of…” He took the stone from his pocket, “This?” 

Washington nodded. Begrudgingly, Alexander nodded back. “Fine.” 

“Go back to the office,” Washington said, so he did. 

Inside, the rest of the aides looked up at him and wore a variety of expressions. John sat back in his chair and watched as Alexander sat near him. 

“Well, you seem unflogged,” John said, studying him a thoughtful manner, “So I suppose you will not be drummed out, and no one will have to pick up for you when you are gone?” 

He could do nothing but utter a disbelieving laugh. For a moment, he thought to share all of this impossibility, but it would be better with context. Tomorrow, then. John would have questions, and he wanted to have answers to them. “No, I will continue to be the most efficient, and do the most work in the least amount of time.”

Tench rolled his eyes. “He does so love his aide’s duties.” 

A snort of laughter this time. Congress was still Congress, but promises, more importantly, were promises. 

“More than anything else in the world,” he said.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Washington stilled for a moment, studied their surroundings (moon oddly dimmed, the ground feeling like the street under his boots, the sense of stone walls around him), and then turned to him, folding his hands behind his back in the way he normally did. "I suppose I should not always be so impressed with your feats, given the rate at which you accomplish them, but you do not know how impressive it was for you to find me last night, especially if you have just come into the ability to do so.”

 

*

This time, when Alexander awoke in the dark, it felt as if tendrils of mist were all around him, through his body and across his skin. It was not painful, and less disorienting than last night. He did not hear or smell the ocean. What he heard was Tench snoring across the room and what he felt was the shift in the bed, when John moved. He reached into the pocket of his sleepshirt and felt the smooth stone, impossibly cool against his fingertips. 

He closed his eyes but did not fall back asleep. He did not yet wish to tell the other aides about all this oddness. He needed more answers to questions he knew they would ask. He wondered, if they would at some point notice his midnight adventures, but if they had not awoken last night when he had staggered out of the bed, confused and half-mad, so that was significant.

Perhaps later he would experiment later with dropping things off shelves. For now, he had his own curiosity to sate. 

He moved around John and put some clothes on. He took his pistol this time, even though it somehow seemed unlikely he would find a use for it.

There was one experiment he could do. He took the stone from his pocket and put it on the table.

Immediately the ocean crept up on him. He heard the crack of a whip and a rattling moan of agony from somewhere behind him, and the sense in his skin went from a tender caress to the clench of a fist. The May night thickened, and when he took a breath he tasted ocean salt. For a second, panic grew in his chest as he looked around and only saw the docks, but there was the stone, on one of the piles of dock crates, and when he picked it up again, the room was again wood and filled with Continental aids. 

He nodded firmly to avoid sighing in relief, and then he put the stone in his pocket and went down the hallway. Would Washington be behind the building, again, like they had done twice? He could not recall where he had walked, last night, so confused by the island coming back to him. He took another resolute breath and stepped into the May night. 

"Hello, Alexander," Washington said, standing in front of the door. Without being half-maddened by the island, he could truly take in the general's strangeness. He seemed carved from one solid piece of black stone. Illuminated by the moon, Alexander could see the delicate carvings that made his shoulder epaulets and the minute little details in his buttons (no longer brass), as if some perfect sculptor had carved him. He could even see a distance between the pupils and the whites of his eyes, even if now they were both black. 

Speechless did not become him, Alexander knew, and yet he had never felt so impossibly lost for words. It was a handy comparison, that the general was like marble, or an arch keystone, but that he very literally seemed to have been carved from a quarry was... 

Washington waited in silence. Alexander gathered himself back from letting his mouth hang. “How is it that you are able to speak?" 

That did not seem to be the expected question, and yet the general missed only a beat before answering. "Speaking is quite easy. To have you hear words, all one must do is vibrate the air." The general beckoned him forward with one carved hand and walked away from the camp, behind headquarters and further away. Alexander saw no guards or soldiers, and he was seized with twin urges - one to let go of the stone, and the other to clench it tighter. There had just been men here, when he had been working. There had been men and fires and food, and now it seemed that they walked through unexplored wilderness, and the longer they walked the wilder it seemed. "The same is true for what you want or should see - a matter of changing how light touches your eye." 

"I did not know you to be a scientist, Your Excellency," Alexander said, trying his best to not completely go mad at the impossibility of all of this, "Although I confess to also not know you to be carved from onyx." 

"I am not a scientist, Hamilton, but you may think me one, if you wish." Washington stilled for a moment, studied their surroundings (moon oddly dimmed, the ground feeling like the street under his boots, the sense of stone walls around him), and then turned to him, folding his hands behind his back in the way he normally did. "I suppose I should not always be so impressed with your feats, given the rate at which you accomplish them, but you do not know how impressive it was for you to find me last night, especially if you have just come into the ability to do so.” 

Alexander wished, quite desperately, he did not feel so out of his depth. There were so many questions to ask, and so much to learn, and it was more daunting at the moment than exciting. He sincerely wished he had a glass of whiskey. "I find myself at a loss of where to start, sir," he said, "I thought it was only a story that you were carved from a mountain." 

"Oh, not a mountain, but a deep place," Washington replied, without missing a beat, "But that comes later in the story, I believe. I would wish to know more about you. This body is new to you?” 

The casualness impossibly both disturbed and calmed him at the same time. He squeezed the stone in his pocket and blinked once and twice, and yes, they were still in a strange slate valley lit by odd moonless light. “Sir,” he said, and folded his hands over his chest in the best play of confidence he could manage, “Do you sincerely believe I would not have asked you about this, had I known?” 

The thing that was Washington did not quite laugh, but Alexander could see the amusement in the quirk of his mouth. It must still be Washington, no matter the strangeness of it. It was just as Washington would have done. “That is true. I wonder what has changed about it.” He looked up into the sky again. “Your kind tend to have attachments to the sky. Has the sky changed, do you know?” 

“My… kind, sir?” 

“You must be a witch, Hamilton. That is certainly the closet capable creature to a human, and in many non-magical ways, witches are indistinguishable from humans.” Somehow it was worse, for Washington to ask him questions about himself that he did not have answers for. “My limited understanding is that witch magic is powered primarily the celestial bodies.” 

It was some kind of answer, at least. _A witch._ As if he would do some naked dance and summon devils. 

What they had called his mother, when they thought he wasn't listening. 

“A witch,” he repeated, doubtfully, shoving his hand and the stone back in his pocket, “Like a children’s story. I have turned into some… cauldron-brewing old woman.” 

Washington tilted his head, not quite laughing. “And fae are small with tiny wings, if I recall. So you may be a woman with a cauldron, consorting with devils.” He waited another moment, contemplating the far-off peaks. “I saw that your mother would sometimes seem strange to you, in the kitchen. I imagine she was a witch, and to protect you, declined to mention it to you. Perhaps she intended to before her passing, and started her next journey before the opportunity arose. It does not answer the question of why you have only noticed me now, but it is a beginning of something.” 

Alexander’s eyes went wide, and he grit his teeth. Stone or no stone, no one on his army talked about his mother, and he vastly preferred it that way. He shook the shock off his face and forced himself into a normal frown. “Did I say that to you, when I was drunk?” 

“When I touched your head last night, I saw it. But I will not be so intrusive again to you, and I hope you will accept my apologies for the moment. It is important to know if you are off to report me to some hunter.” 

There was another still pause as he tried to think about that moment. It was hard to separate what had actually happened from the ocean and the whip and the docks and the shouting. Washington had been there, he was sure. Washington had touched his head with a cool, stone hand. Washington had asked him about his family. 

“You read my mind?” he asked, trying and failing to not look astonished. If stone-Washington could touch him and know what he thought, than what wasn’t this thing capable of? 

“In particular and specific circumstances, it is not so difficult to understand surface thoughts.” It was more complicated than yes, but it was enough. 

There was too much more learn to obsess over it, for now. Which thread did he which to pursue next? There were the greater ones - that Washington was in fact some wild monster ( _fae_ ), and even though he ran his army like a human, and he had always seemed human until that night -- what did this alien want with the country and the war? 

_Start small_ , he told himself. There was an impossible fear of being swallowed by the wild newness of everything, that had never felt this before. Even when others were overwhelmed, he saw the opportunity to grow and learn, and did not understand their panic. Only now did he understand what they felt. 

He pulled the stone from his pocket and displayed it in his hand. "Why am I not transported back to the island, when I hold this rock? Am I carrying around a finger or toe of yours?" 

“I suppose that could be some part of me, although it is not presently. It is a beacon of sorts. It works because you are not able to control yourself, which seems entirely characteristic of you. It replaces your island with my caverns.”

Incredible, that he could still be insulted during all this strangeness. “As funny as it seems, I still do not understand.” 

Washington quirked a stone eyebrow at him. It was oddly comforting, that this strange thing could do things that were entirely and utterly Washington. It spoke in the same cadence and treated him in a similar manner and used the words Washington would use. No matter the strangeness, he was confident the thing was his general.

“Many magical beings have an aura that they project based on their being, that you can sense. I am a stone fae, so my aura is stone. My understanding is that witches are unique in that they can control their aura, though it seems you are not able to do so. The longer you look for an aura, the greater the impression of the auras around you." He gestured, and Alexander looked. 

Gone were the trees and shrubs and grasses, and the rolling hills. They had all been replaced with slate, and in the distance were towering mountains with grey caps. Headquarters, and the rest of the army, was gone. How could he have not seen it?

“You have disappeared the entire army!” He shouted, unable to keep back the stunned surprise brought about by the empty plane. “I think the army would know if you disappeared them.” 

“They are where they have always been,” Washington replied, as calmly as ever, “Only you are no longer able to see them, because your instinctive ability to perceive my power is overwhelming the rest of your senses.” Washington waited another moment, perhaps for Alexander to repress the edge of his panic. “The world is not limited to your eyes and your ears, if you have become a witch. You can now also a magical sense, which, it seems to me, that you are neither able to control how you feel to others, nor how you feel others.” 

Alexander took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying again to repress the panic. He was suddenly somewhere impossible that was unrelated to his sight, or something. He had appeared here apropos of nothing, with only Washington-as-stone, and none of the aides or the rest of the army. He concentrated on his breathing to try and calm himself down, as he had done when he was a child. There was his breath even if everything else was impossible and horrifying. 

Blessedly, Washington kept talking. It was a strange anchor, but an anchor nonetheless. “The world is not limited to how you experience it. There are things that you cannot hear, or see, or smell. You require another sense for that, and humans lack it, but witches do not." A beat. "I imagine it is a lot to process, if it is all coming so suddenly. I see no harm in explaining some of it to you, especially given as I know you will go off and investigate otherwise. I think if you ask all the questions you have, it will take a long, long time to get any answers. I am not yet sure enough to take you Elsewhere to answer them.” 

_Elsewhere_? It did not seem elsewhere was Pennsylvania or Virginia. Washington said Elsewhere as if it was further than Prussia or China.

 _Stay focused_ , he told himself. He forced all the other impossibility to the side and tried to take one step at a time. "Tell me more about this stone. It makes me see all this, and not the island?” 

“Yes,” Washington answered, “As I said, the aura I have is one of stone. Since I gave you that stone, the aura you display is also stone. Or, if a wood fae was here, it would be stone and forest. Some beings prefer to hide their aura, some have more, and some have less. Witches are one of the few creatures that can change everything about theirs. My suspicion is since you have just discovered and/or obtained this sense, in both an incoming and an outgoing way, you are using it in a very instinctive manner.” 

“You said witches can control it. How can I?”

Washington shrugged. “I am not capable of doing so, and have no way to tell you. Another witch may know.” 

“Are there other witches in the army?” 

“If there are, it is their prerogative to show themselves to you.” 

Alexander frowned. Washington did not usually so openly hide things from him. That there could be other witches, and Washington declined to direct him to them, seemed strange. Could the other witches threaten him? Was it dangerous, for him to be wandering in the territory of unknown others? “What if I upset them without noticing? Is it not best for me to know how to control this sense, or at least directed to someone who can assist me in learning? What if I go mad in my ignorance?” 

“If there are other witches in the army,” Washington said, watching him in his familiar way despite the impossibility of it, “They certainly can feel you, and they make the decision not to approach you. I prefer to be diplomatic with them, rather than you, as infantile as you seem.”

“I am not _infantile_ ,” he snapped, without thinking. 

“You are incredibly infantile,” Washington replied, and stepped closer to him. He suddenly felt as stone as his surroundings, and when he took a breath it felt like inhaling sharp sawdust. An odd chill fell over him. He was not cold, per se, but something was different and unpleasant. “You are presently broadcasting your childhood trauma to anything that can see it. That does not strike me as the action of a mature adult, and I think you would agree. Regardless of the nature of the circumstances of you becoming or maturing into a witch, you are obviously and evidently unprepared.” 

Even if he had an answer, his tongue felt leaden. 

Washington touched his face with a stone hand and lifted his chin to study him, as if he was some battle map. “That being said,” he continued, his voice now contemplative, “You have never failed to acquire a skill you needed, so I have confidence you will learn to control your sense with or assistance. Not to mention you only seem to struggle when I display myself. I imagine holding my human form causes you to think less about it.” 

Alexander cleared his throat and took a breath of newly clean air. He watched Washington walk away from him, though it was hard to tell if he headed back towards the camp or not. Alexander tested a step and found himself able to move again, so he followed. He would bring himself back to the real world. He would see the real forest and the real army. He would escape this granite prison of his own making. Despite the overwhelming wildness of it, he could not be overcome. Being overwhelmed was nothing new, after all. He had been overwhelmed by loneliness and work and the ship fire and appearing in a new land. This was no different, and he would conquer it all the same. 

He reached into his pocket, gripped the stone, and placed it on the ground front of him. Almost instantly, the ocean was in his ears. If he focused he could hear the whip, and feel the August heat. 

“Yes, that,” Washington said, dry.

“I can stop it,” he replied. 

He repelled the island instead of reaching out to it, this time. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought about essays, and college, and protests. Troup laughing in their bedroom. Professors lecturing in classrooms. The chaos of New York, before they had evacuated. Anything but the ocean and the island. 

“Are you sure?” Washington asked. 

“Yes,” Alexander said, and _pushed_. He did something in a way he had never done anything before. It was if he had grown a new arm, and used it to shove aside some obstacle in his path. Even an arm would have been familiar. This was new in ways he could barely explain to himself, nonetheless to anyone else. He did not have a word for what he did, or what he flexed. It happened.

“The persistent and impossible ability of Colonel Hamilton,” Washington said, outside the campus of King’s College, somewhere. His eyes twinkled with evident delight, visible regardless of his carved form. “Now, see the army, not your aura.” 

He felt the limb. It was not at all like a new arm. It was not like anything else. It was all over him, like a skin he could fell over his current skin. It was as if someone had put a sense in his jacket, and the sense could detect something different. It prickled in an alien way, though it was more unfamiliar than unpleasant.

How did his other senses work? He could feel his eyes in their sockets, and the air in his nose, and the pads of his fingers. He knew the taste buds on his tongue. If there was some way he could trace the prickling back to it’s sense, and some way to work that muscle, even if it was a muscle. Maybe there was some flex or tense to that part of him. He tested arms and legs and looked for something else. 

_There_ , the limb again. How did you manipulate it? Could you clench it like a muscle? There was no muscle there to tense. 

He thought again of the college, and laughing nights at taverns, and studying law. The limb was closer now, somehow, and he thought _I want to see the earth._ I want to _see_. 

He saw the semi-forest plain, and the moon and the stars, and the good weather. Trees swayed in a gentle breeze around him. When he turned his head he saw the headquarters building, as white-painted as it always had been. 

“Perhaps pre-adolescent, instead of infantile,” Washington conceded, “As I said, you have been capable of all other things prior.” 

“I will practice,” Alexander said. 

“I am sure you will,” Washington replied.

“When I become improved at this, will you answer more questions that I have?” 

“Colonel Hamilton,” Washington folded his arms behind him, and there was a strange shimmer that Alexander felt only in his sense, and then Washington was flesh again, blue wool and brass buttons and skin, and watching him with the smile at the corner of his mouth, “I can assure you, I will be here for the foreseeable future. So when you have more questions in the future, I will see if I can provide the best answers. For now, though, I think you should rest." 

Something like a mosquito stung him in his new limb. “Yes, sir,” he said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was another aura, out there in the early morning. It felt like a groomed European manor. It felt as organized as a garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i'm late. i had to rewrite the whole chapter.

 

*

Alexander awoke, and was instantly confident some magic had been cast on him. He felt revitalized in way that no rest had ever given him. He felt as if someone had tucked him into a king’s bed, warmed to his body, and let him sleep all night.

It was early in the morning - too early for a person to actually be rested by their sleep. John was out of bed - perhaps Washington had wanted him for something and had not required to wake the rest of them. The rest of the aides were still sleeping. 

He closed his eyes again and sighed a quiet sigh. It was nice to be rested, and yet it reminded him of everything had happened. He could not feel this rested if Washington was not cut from stone and had told him he was a witch and did magic on him. His restfulness spoke to him differently than everything else. Strange stone men and hallucinations were queer enough that he could loop them together. But to be rested? No man slept well in the army. 

Washington had spoken about his sense. A limb. A muscle without being a muscle. That was what had given him all those thoughts of the whip and the docks and the sound of human agony. He could not control it, Washington said, so it was acting instinctually. 

He had not only been made by the sounds of unfair ruling families and their cargo. He had been built just as much from King’s College and his essays about the war and the inside of his mother’s house, even if had been small. He had discipline and he would use it. 

He flexed the sense, or something like it. He closed his eyes and concentrated on lecture halls and libraries. He pushed out the feeling of studying by candlelight and the sight of New York. He reached out with the smallest of touches towards the island, brought the humidity of it close, and then sealed it away. 

How many times, had he sealed the island away? It was not so different to do it again, was it? 

He could not feel another touch with the sense, other than his. Washington was not here, was it? If he reached out, further -- 

He felt Washington like the touch of river stones under one’s feet. Even from here, Washington felt smooth and cold and sleek. He felt every bit as poised as he looked. He felt like a marble room. 

Washington felt him back. Washington reached out in the sense and acknowledged him. 

There was another, out there in the early morning. It felt like a groomed European manor. It felt as organized as a garden. 

Alexander opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. There was something else magical here. Someone else, maybe. Another witch. 

Were there Tory witches? If he closed his eyes again, could he feel them, infesting New York? Did they reach out with their senses and try to understand what kind of magic that the army had? Could he reach across the ocean and learn if there was a school for witches, in England? 

He restrained the curiousity about English witches. That was one thing. The magical thing here, though -- he had to know. It was not him, and it was not Washington, and that meant that someone or something else had probably felt the island and had decided not to involved. 

He could escape without waking the other aides without John being there. He dressed quickly and took in the empty main room before stepping outside in the pre-dawn light. The camp was already beginning to start activity - fires getting lit, the groaning and complaining of sentries. Caps were tipped to him, and only out of habit did he respond back. 

He closed his eyes again; it was easier to use the sense like that. Washington was a little further, when he walked down the hallway. The manor was closer now, as if he was in a beautiful carriage pulled by some magical horse. 

The sense brought him to one of the other houses. Foreign diplomats slept here. 

What was his alibi, if someone asked him why he was here? The thought only made him hesitate a moment before he pushed the door open. The whole building was asleep; he had a moment to close his eyes and think about the sense again. He was practically in the manor house at this point; whoever or whatever it was definitely in this room. 

Did whoever it was come to the war to be near Washington? 

“Good morning, Colonel Hamilton,” whispered a familiar voice in a whisper, in a cheery French accent. “You look a bit queer, standing in the hallway with your eyes closed.” 

He was startled from the feeling - he was practically in the living room of the manor now, down to the empty seats for the musicians and tables sat on the edges of the room. Whoever it was had excellent taste in the furnishing of the room, including the decorations and tapestries hanging from the walls. 

“Ah, good morning, Mr. du Ponceau,” he said, trying to catch his footing. He had not known Pierre to be a morning person. The baron visibly loathed all hours before ten in the morning, He wished, at that moment, he had thought of an alibi. After a moment: “The general was looking for you.” 

“Oh, me?” Pierre replied, watching him with his familiar grin, “How can I assist the general at this present juncture?” 

“Ah, I think I forgot his missive,” Alexander said, and bowed his head in an apology, “Please forgive me. I shall retrieve it right away.” 

“I shall be here when you recover it,” Pierre said. Alexander gave him a quick salute and walked back the hallway towards outside. There was a little more rumbling in the camp now, though no one was yet awake that had the rank to comment on what he was sure was very strange behavior. He closed his eyes again and focused on the European manor. He was outside now, though still quite close. In fact, he thought that the magical person was likely just inside, though not on the suite of rooms closer to front of the building. The manor did not seem far enough to be in the back of the building, either. It was as if the owner of the aura was in the ….. 

_… hallway._

He sucked in a gasp of surprise, blew it out his mouth in attempt to calm his thoughts, then walked back into the building and took in Pierre du Ponceau, who was watching him with a smile at the corner of his mouth and his hands settled behind his back. 

“What brings you to dress so early, Mr. du Ponceau?” Alexander asked. The baron was certainly snoring, and Pierre was usually found by his side - usually North was the messenger of the group. However, certainly if he had felt someone coming to talk to he, he would have dressed himself to have a conversation. 

“I thought I might be called upon,” Pierre said, and tilted his head in unmistakably knowing way, “Did you remember the missive Washington had for me?” 

If Pierre was a witch, why would he sit in the shadow of the baron? 

Alexander took one furtive look around the hallway, waiting for a door to open. Then, see nothing, he resettled his posture into something casual and took a breath. “I have no other way to say this, so I hope it is not untoward; are you a witch?” 

Pierre did not quite laugh, but the smile spread wider across his face. “No, there is nothing untoward about it. I was not going to say anything about the fact that the realignment made your aura do something so strange and intense. It can do such things, as you know. Given the masterful effort you took to hide it for so long and so completely, it was obvious you did not wish to be found, so I was not going to find you.” 

Pierre thought he had always been a witch. 

Pierre thought he had just been hiding it up until now. 

_Realignment?_

Washington had said something about changing. Alexander thought back. 

_Your kind tend to have attachments to the sky. Has the sky changed, do you know?_

What should he say? Would it be better for Pierre to think that he had had some change in heart and caused him to make this contact? Should he be honest about the events of the past week? Would Pierre know more about what had happened to him? 

He would never learn more if Pierre thought he was already informed. It seemed horrible to expose himself, but how could he go unexposed forever? They found out about his youth, and his parentage, and the island. Some of them judged him worse for it, sure. But Alexander knew had heard some of the reason von Stueben was here. He was not the only one who worried about exposure. Pierre must have known about that. 

If Pierre was a witch, maybe he would know. 

“Do you wish to speak outside about it?” he began. 

“Oh, come into the baron’s room instead,” Pierre said, and gestured him back. 

“Will the baron not be awoken by our conversation?” Alexander asked. Certainly Pierre knew he was far from the quietest person in the army. 

Pierre snorted back a laugh and turned back to the room without answering. Alexander chewed his lips followed, masking his confusion. He stepped inside the baron’s room, took in the sleeping baron and his sleeping aides, and watched Pierre sit at a chair at the desk and pull another chair over. Pierre was looking at what he was certain was an aghast expression with a great amount of puzzlement. 

“Ah,” Alexander said, struggling to find his footing. Washington being made of stone was absurd enough that he could go with it under the pretense that it was just madness; the lunacy of Pierre not acting like he would wake up half the house by dragging a chair was just normal enough that it was difficult to process. “I was not hiding my aura. I did not have one before you felt it.” 

Pierre blinked at him for a moment. He took advantage of the silence and continued, with a bit more steam. “I am not sure what the realignment is, but if it was this week, it is the cause of you sensing my aura, though it is not that I was hiding it. Before that, I did not have one. I was not a witch. I became one.” 

Pierre stared at him, but this time Alexander waited. It was oddly gratifying to see someone else as confounded by these circumstances. “You mean to say that up until two days ago, you did not know you were a witch?” 

“I did not not know I was a witch. I was not one.” 

“No one _becomes_ a witch, realignment or no.” 

Alexander lifted his chin. “Well, I have, and I am telling you this so you will tell me how to be an effective witch, if there are some -- spells, or skills or some kind. If you know them, I would like to know them.” 

The Frenchman cast him an extremely skeptical look. “That was not something that happened, when I was being taught,” he said, and then pointed to the chair he had pulled over. “Is it because you just became a witch that you are not aware of the ramifications of the realignment? It was impressed upon me that strange things do happen, although I would not think them so strange as turning a man into a witch.” 

“Your guess is as good as mine, sir,” Alexander said, and sat, “And yes, I have no understanding of what ‘the realignment’ is.” 

“Witch magic is primarily guided by the plants and stars and how they are oriented to each other. When there are significant changes in their orientation, such as one planet passes through or around the orbit of another, strange things can occur to witches and within witch magic. Witches are impressed from a very young age to never do magic on such nights.” 

“Something strange has happened to me!” he said, standing from the chair and throwing his arms out. He took a deep breath to try to calm himself and took in the room. “First, I woke and felt like I was transported far away. Then, I found General Washington glowing in the moonlight and learned he was made out of stone. Now, I am having a conversation with you in a room where no one is waking up despite the volume of it.” 

Alexander sat back in the chair and put his hands in his lap, leaning forward and trying to figure out if anything else about Pierre looked different. At least he did not appear to be made out of stone. “I understand that this is all very stranger. It is not stranger to anyone else than it is for me. However, as it does appear to be the way things are presently set, rather than me staggering around in complete ignorant. So I am pleading of you, if there is some material on the matter you can give me to read, or perhaps teach me how to be a proper witch, if you would do so.” He waited another beat, trying to gather his thoughts. He thought, again, about how it was easier ot be calm in the sheer face of Washington’s absurdity, and something about Pierre was just normal enough to make everything seem incomprehensibly insane. “For example, if you could teach me how to make them not wake up, I would appreciate that.” 

Pierre frowned at him and followed his gaze to the Baron, then to Ben North, and then out the window, and then back to him. “”No,” he said. 

The firmness of the word took Alexander aback. “No?” 

“I am afraid that is not something I can do for you, Colonel,” Pierre said, “I do not have any reading material for you, and I have no lessons to teach you what I know. Since you have been honest with me about your absurdity, I will be honest with you.” Then the Frenchman smiled a grim little smile, “I fled my teachers in the middle of my training, and I have little interest in becoming a teacher, and I have very little interest in doing any but the most rudimentary magic, as long as I live.” 

The directness and seriousness of it was all very un-Pierre, and it unsettled him further. Pierre was neither direct nor serious about anything, even those things Alexander thought he should be direct and serious about. He tried a different tack. “Is it not dangerous for me to be half-knowing witch things?” 

Pierre put his face in his hand and kept his intent inexpression. “Perhaps it is,” he said, but not in a way that gave Alexander hope his mind could be changed, “But I will not be involved in changing it. I know that this is all quite unlike me, but you must know that I have my reasons, and they are good ones.” 

The pronouncement felt extremely final. He was not prepared to argue with someone so committed, at least educated as he currently was. He would need to be better equipped. 

“Will you at least tell me why those reasons are so good?” he asked. That was a good first step.

“In fact, I will,” Pierre replied, and took a deep breath, perhaps trying to figure out where to start. “On this plane - this world, this country, this planet, and there are others, although it is not the time or the place to talk about it--” He held up his hand as Alexander opened his mouth, and Alexander chomped down on his lip to keep the questions at bay, “There are rules about how magic can be done, how it can be done, what kind of visibility it can have. You are not, for example, allowed to call a hellish rain of fire stones from the sky, though such things are possible for very powerful, very old witches. To enforce these rules - and while I know, Colonel, that you are always interested in seeing in what ways the rules can be bent, I urge you not to experiment with these - there are beings. They are called hunters. Attracting their attention will lead to your untimely demise.”

How could a man seem so less like himself, when he spoke about anything? Something about Pierre was much different as he explained - he seemed aged, in a tired way, and not a wise way. Put simply, he has simply never seen Pierre so completely lacking in cheer as he discussed a topic, no matter how terrible that topic could be. It took the urge to argue out of him, a little. “Nonetheless,” Alexander replied, trying to be gentle, “I can be taught without attracting such attention.” 

“I am so sure,” Pierre said, “Magic often reflects the witch. My concern is the reflection of you will be boisterous and impressive.” 

It took him a moment to process this. “You will not teach me to be a witch because you think my magic will attract unwanted attention.” 

“That is the main reason, though there are others.” 

It was actually a fairly easy point to argue. In fact, Alexander had expected something much worse, given the severity of how Pierre discussed it. “If the general can be made of stone and does not attract, ah, _hunters_ , then you and I sitting in a room lighting lanterns is going to attract them.” 

PIerre actually laughed, a dry, unpleasant laugh. “You have no idea what the general is capable of, and that you do not means that he has decided not to show you, or anyone else. And he does so for his own reasons, and one of them is that he does not wish to be winked out of existence.” He waited another moment, then tilted his head in a knowing, smug way. At least it was more PIerre, even if something was mean about it, “Before the realignment, did the general ever seem unearthly to you, other than in his aloof way? If uncrowned fae make an effort to not attract such attention, than that is quite the signal.” 

The answer took him off guard. Washington being made out of stone was strange enough; it was true that he had not really put any thought into what stone Washington could do .Washington had definitely been doing some kind of magic when Alexander had first discovered him, and he had never asked what it was. Washington had said something -- 

What had he said? 

_It is important to know if you are off to report me to some hunter._

Washington had not said it with fear, thought. He had said it in a pragmatic way, as if a hunter would be an inconvenience to whatever he had planned. But that was all to consider with Washington, and did not solve the current issue. 

Washington would said he would answer his questions. He would address it then. For now -- 

“You cannot simply reject me because you are afraid,” he said, circling back to the issue at hand, “Everyone is always afraid about the war, and we continue to fight it. We could be killed by some redcoat everyday and we do not simply quit or refuse to fight. 

“Not only can I, but I am,” Pierre said, and shrugged. 

“You do magic on these men you care about,” Alexander gestured to sleeping baron and his compatriots, “And you cannot teach me even the simplest of spells? And there is no books you can give me, that I can become self-directed?” 

Pierre shook his head. “You make it sound much simpler than it is. I do not have any spellbooks or other books of magic on this continent. As what what I am doing right now with the Baron and Monsieur North - I would not know the first thing about how to teach it to you. Many witches have what is called a domain - an area of world or spellcraft that they find easy to manipulate. If you have just turned into a witch, perhaps you have one, or maybe you always had one and were unable to access it. Nonetheless, my domain is language and speech, and so it has always been easy to manipulate them. I was told teaching magic is much different from doing magic, and I never learned the former.” 

“I must confess, Mr. du Ponceau,” Alexander said, trying to not let the anger spill out of him like a wave, “If you had come to me, in the situation I presently find myself in, I would not hesitate to make myself as useful as possible. I would not expect you to simply bear the confusion and impossibility of all this.” Another beat. “You say you do magic and cast spells on me and the Baron. And if you truly do wish to avoid magic, why did you come to a cause run by a -- ‘stone fae’? You must have known he was here, and you flocked to him.” 

“Had I know the general was as it is, I would have persuaded the baron not to come. But it was too late when I discovered it, so I am here. Although as a fae and I a witch, I am beneath the general’s notice, and prefer it that way.” 

Pierre stood from his chair and sighed. He pushed the chair in to the desk, glanced at the sleeping men again, and held Alexander in an uncharacteristically serious gaze. “I am sorry, Colonel. I wish I could do more to help you. The teaching of spells to me was unkind, I am not passing it or them to you. If you truly feel that this divide will be the end of our friendship, then so be it. That is all.” 

It all sounded so final that Alexander did not know what to do. He thought to be angry at it, but there was no use in being angry at a brick wall. He thought to argue, but soon he would be noticed in headquarters, and that was a whole different issue. Being so comprehensively stonewalled took the wind out of his sails. 

It was worse than being rejected from Princeton, because there was not even any Columbia to apply to instead. Princeton had not been so cruel and firm with him. Worse, Princeton was not a person, and had not been his friend. 

“I have a final question,” he said, feeling tired even though he had just woken up, and somehow defeated even though this was a new cause and a new challenge and he had been fine on his own a thousand times over, “If I could bother you with it.” 

“I will see what I can do.” 

“If the general truly is some incredibly powerful faerie from a different universe, why does he bother himself with this war?” 

An easier smile let Pierre’s face. “Oh, that is easy,” he said, and moved to stand next to the door with his arm extended. Not knowing what else to do, Alexander took it, and the two of them made their way back to the headquarters as PIerre spoke. “There are different kinds of fae - stone, wood, air, more, for sure. They have a kingdom, in another plane, and when their old king dies, all the fae that want to become the new king or queen go on a quest to another place to rule that place, and they have a fae council who decides who is best at ruling another world, and that fae gets to be king. I am sure he can give you a better explanation, if you ask.” 

That required some digesting, at least. 

“Thank you, Mr. du Ponceau,” he said, letting the puzzle consume him, instead of his anger. He could focus on that later.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I am going to see if His Excellency requires me for something else other than writing; perhaps some other task will set my mind better at ease."

*

  


It was true, Alexander thought, that he was powered primarily by rejection. First the island, then Princeton, then the British of his country. Despite the depth and scale of how new everything was, he would get to the bottom of it, and succeed. What _succeed_ meant, in this case, was still up for confusion. Nonetheless, he would achieve it. 

He thought about how Washington had come to be here, and he thought about magic. He also, somehow, managed to stop thinking about Washington and magic, and dedicate himself back to the war. It was not that the war was not important, of course. It was that there was some disconnect in scale between the impossibility of what he was, and what Pierre was, and what Washington was -- and then around them it was all the same war, and his friends argued about documents, and the soldiers argued with their commanders, and it all went on. Somehow, he felt like something should have changed after this shift - something should be different, and nothing was. 

If he concentrated, he could get into those arguments with them, and work on his letters, and offer strategy, and provide instruction. At night he made quick scribbles of all the questions and possible plans and strategies he had to move forward. He still knew that he needed a teacher, or at least a decent essay, to know more about this. He did not sense anyone else magical, which only left the general for him to approach. If there was anyone else, they hid.

Pierre could reject him, could Washington? 

The general could not leave the army, if he needed to promote himself into his other kingdom. If all Washington needed from the war was to promote his cause, than Alexander felt no guilt about forcing his hand. That his land and his land and his country was used in a chess game for a far away kingdom - he tried not to let the offense of it get to him. 

He did what he thought might be practicing his magic, and in the end of three days, he could not even light the wick of a candle. Perhaps there was some secret to it that Washington could share. On the fourth day he woke up feeling resolved to move forward despite the ridiculousness of it all.

It was impossible to concentrate on actual work. The words swam, and the other aids chided him for his spelling errors.

"You cannot deceive me that you are not distracted," John said, bumping against him against and disturbing him from his thoughts. "You stare at the same documents over again and we have to ask you every question twice. Certainly it is not so terrible or burdensome that you must keep it all to yourself?" 

Alexander put the pen down and shook his head. John would think he was mad; sometimes he thought he was mad. He would need more to share with the other aides. He needed not only questions to bring to them; he needed answers. "My mind is only unsettled.” That was not untrue, at least. “Do not let my wandering thoughts distract you from your work. Maybe, this once, you will be more studious than I." 

John laughed. "You need not give me handicaps. I can out-write you perfectly fine without them, if I tried to do such." 

"I do not think that is the case. Perhaps I am only wishing to put my work off so I may beat you out at the last moment." He stood, gathered his confidence, and set the documents aside for a moment. The middle of the day was better; Washington would feel more pressured to accept him, and there might be a crowd, that would stop the general from doing something strange. "I am going to see if His Excellency requires me for something else other than writing; perhaps some other task will set my mind better at ease." 

"Shirking his duties, as always," Tench added, from across the room. Alexander forced a laugh, made sure his jacket was neat, and walked outside. 

There were only a few good places the general would be, if he was not in the office with all of them. There was a hill a little while away, where they had a small guardpost; Washington often spent time there studying the field and waiting for Lafayette to return from Philadelphia. Alexander made his way over, taking in the morale of the soldiers. It was better than it had been, what with the rumors that the British were abandoning the city. Good news from the north. Maybe they actually would win the war, which had seemed impossible. Although if Washington was in it for some distant, alien cause - how could he let them lose? Certainly some impossible stone magic being would not let the measily British stop him from his kingdom. 

Washington was with General Knox on the hill, talking about cannons. Knox was laughing at some dry joke Washington had made and was certainly in total ignorance that Washington was a strange alien made of stone and had all his own goals. 

Alexander was struck by a thought. Out of all the people Alexander had met through the war, Henry Knox was among the best. He wondered if Washington would do something to him, if he tried. Certainly, if anyone else would take such an announcement in stride -- 

"General Knox!" he said, as he came close, and Knox turned and brightened when they made eye contact. Alexander thought to start with Washington’s peculiarities first, before explaining his own. He formed the words in his head first. _I know it sounds mad, but did you know Washington is a stone fae from a realm far from ours?_

His mouth said: "Have you heard the story about the old man who could not stop returning to the same well?" 

His magic sense felt like it had been pinched, hard, and the stung hummed in his sense for a long moment after.

Knox stared at him for a moment.”I beg your pardon?" he asked, his mouth dropping into a frown, "Is this a secret code His Excellency has neglected to inform me of?" He cast a suspicious side-glance at Washington, who was staring off into the distance with his spyglass and no doubt only pretending to ignore the goings-on.

Some sort of magic had been done on him; there was no doubt about it. That was not what he intended. What he had wanted say to say that Washington was in fact chiseled out of a mountain or a cave, and spoke the way you could hear not because of throat muscles but because of -- 

_Again_ , he thought, and sturdied his will.

"My apologies, General,” he said, “What I intended to say was, there was once a beautiful young woman who sat at a loom and made the most spectacular wool," he said, and the sense pinched, and he stopped. Then, "A king had ten daughters and each worse than the last--" Then, "Across a terrible marsh lay a cave with twenty exits--" 

His whole sense was ringing now, like his ears had been boxed. He moved his tongue in his mouth, which felt dry all of a sudden. 

"Your Excellency," Knox said, turning away from Alexander and to Washington, "Look what you’ve done to a perfectly good young gentleman: driven him completely ou tof his wits. Do you think you could acquire another aide or two so they spout less nonsense?” 

"My apologies, for my apparent madness," Alexander said, forcing himself to look less staggered. Could Washington teach him how to do this magic? Was there some way he could investigate the pinch in his sense further? Could he work backwards? Did it come naturally to Washington, as Pierre’s speech ability said it came to him?

He should save just a little face,he thought. “My apologies. Another aid told me a joke, but I could not remember how it went." 

"A joke indeed," Knox replied, evidently dubious, "Is there something we can assist you with, Colonel?" 

"The desk has, as you say, driven me a bit mad,” he said, "I was merely wondering if the general had use of me otherwise." 

Washington finally folded the spyglass shut and turned to face them. He beckoned Alexander towards him. “In fact,” he said, inscrutable, “I think I do. Walk with me. General Knox, if we could continue at another moment?” 

"Certainly,” Knox said. He sighed a heavy sigh and shook his head, then looked at Alexander as he turned to walk away. “Do take a walk, every once in a while, if it will free you from your madness. We can use you at some partial efficiency rather than none at all." 

“Yes, sir,” Alexander said. The two of them watched the portly general return to the camp, and then Washington gestured for him to follow down the knoll. 

When they had taken a few more steps, Washington spoke again, still studying the field, "No," he said, as if Alexander had asked a question, "I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not aware of the inconceivable rudeness of explaining things to men who do better in ignorance. You should be wary of such a thing, though. Hunters are said to dislike it.” 

He restrained the smile. It was a very good plan indeed. 

Instead: “Did you do that magic on me right now, or did you do it on a previous day?” 

“The spell is in fact not on you, but on the knowledge.” Washington said. It was baffling, that the general could be some inhumane creature, and still have all the habits and manners that he knew the general to have. “It cannot be shared to humans.” 

He thought, not for the first time, maybe this had all been a mad dream, in this completely normal moment. Then he closed his eyes and felt the sense and saw slate when he looked at the general. He had too many questions, again. 

“Is that all?” Washington asked, after the silence. “Perhaps it would serve the army to find more impossible revelations, that predisposes you to these long silences.” 

“The army would miss my spectacular and numerous opinions,” he retorted, as mildly as he could. Washington chuckled, just once. No to move forward with the two things he needed most: more about Washington, and a teacher. Better, he had decided, to get the first one first. “I would like to know, if it is not an imposition, why you are here at all, sir. I hope you do not wish to take an American crown. I would not like us to be in dispute.” 

“There is nothing you need to worry less than me being king of America,” Washington replied. He paused for a few moments, considering something unknown. “I think it will take a lot of time, to explain everything you likely have questions for. There is a way to transfer knowledge more efficiently, although I suspect it could be quite unpleasant.”

“We should do it,” Alexander said, instantly, “I am experienced with unpleasantness.” 

“You should consider more than that.” 

“There is nothing to consider,” he said, “It cannot be more unpleastant than not knowing the answers and knowing you could know them.” 

There was another moment where Alexander was sure that Washington would reject him. Then: “Very well,” he said, “Stay still.” 

Washington came closer to him, so close that he count the smallpox pockmarks that lined his face. He seemed, Alexander thought, incredibly flesh-like for only pretending. 

Washington closed his eyes, and opened them again - Alexander felt something like a breeze and was sure magic had been done. Then the general took his face in hands that looked like flesh but were as hard and cold as slate, and touched a stone-solid forehead to his. 

He felt a rumble that had no sound but reminded him of horse hooves. It was a preface to something massive and powerful and he had a flicker of doubt, but by then it was too late. His whole consciousness blinked and resisted before giving way. 

There was a throne that his eyes refused to process in an innumerable number of scales. It was massive, but it was not only tall, or wide, or deep - it occupied space in an impossibly dense way. It was as if the world as he knew it was a piece of wood, and the throne was a piece of lead - although they were the same size, the lead would be impossible to heft. It was every color and none of them; it was made of air and sea and stone and heartbreak and loss and love and horror. It was deafeningly empty. It was not a thing of this world. It had a life of it’s own in it’s immenseness. Alexander knew he would never quite be able to remember it correctly and yet he would never forget it. 

There were figures around the throne. They were as massive as the throne, but where the throne was everything condensed into an impossible single place, the figures were so incredibly one thing that it was nearly impossible to notice they were figures at all. One was a massive tree of every species. One was a windstorm. One was a pile of murk that nearly drowned him despite how far away it seemed. 

The throne went away. 

He was in a city impossible angles with unimaginable pinnacles and deep gouges. It was as vast and deep as the ocean and taller than mountains Alexander saw in the distance. There were balconies that hung in stalactites, and in those balconies were stone beings. 

He felt one more intently than the other. From this impossible viewpoint, through walls and earth and stone, it appeared the same as all the others. And yet this one he knew. This one was Washington, though there was nothing properly Washington about it, just yet. It was the being that would be Washington, and it stared up at him through stone ceilings and melting magma and earth plates and grasslands. He knew, where he had not known before, that It had planned for this moment from its inception and knew the people it would use and the place where they were and the man it would become. 

Alexander saw it stand in front of the impossible figures and the awesome throne like it was a flicking, moving painting. It stood in front of the stern figures with it's competition. There were no sounds, but it knew, and Alexander knew, as if someone read him a letter or told him a story: it would go, and it prove what it was capable of, and it had found just the people to use. 

Then he was at what had not known but now knew was Virginia. The people there were messy and indistinct, like chalk drawings. They looked all the same, with blurred faces and clothes smeared onto their forms. 

Washington was there. He had this name, now. He was an angles were the people were smudges and dark where the others were pastel. Even when the others came close, they seemed far. Even when the scenery turned to blood and screams in the dark forest canopy, it was far away despair that he knew it was near. Even when whole wooden rooms were blotched with pale balls, there was always the sense that this place was not his place. 

Then he was falling. Only it was not as simple and explainable as falling, but rather perhaps he was being pulled, and he was not falling down, but rather in every direction all at once. 

He felt grass and scrub under his feet, and took one step and then another, and then his leg came out from under him and his whole body made an extremely sold impact. At least he had enough energy to roll over, because then the morning’s meal, and last night’s meal, and perhaps yesterday’s lunch, forced itself out of his stomach and up into the grass. felt the morning's oatmeal push throat, and with a retch, hit the grass right under him. Under him was the grass and it was May and he was in Pennsylvania. He was not in impossible caverns or born in Virginia or judged by strange things that he could only imagine were like gods, no matter how blasphemous it was. 

Finally, he sat up and wiped his mouth and tried to get the taste from the back of his throat. The ground was firm under him, and the sky was warm. He was not in impossible places looking at impossible things and feeling impossible ways. He was here, and there was the garbage-sweet smell of the pile of his vomit, and the sound of his panting breaths. 

He wiggled a bit away from the smell and forced himself to look up. Washington was studying him, unreadable. 

After he was sure his legs would hold him, he stood. He felt shivery and sick all over, and after a few moments realized that standing was a bad idea. A few more steps away, and Washington followed, and then Alexander sat back down, using his palms to prop himself up and trying to separate his own memories from the places and things he’d just seen. 

“Those --- figures,” he croaked, even though the word was so limiting, “The council?”

Washington nodded. 

“And the throne you want?” 

Nod.

“And that place -- the chasms, and the stone spikes, with houses -- is where you are from?” 

Nod.

He closed his eyes and just focused on breathing.

“That felt different than I expected,” Washington said, thoughtful, “Easier, certainly. And you have done much better to receive than I thought you would. You did not feel as I expected you to feel. I noticed, when I did not think I would, that you have suffered.” 

Something about it, delivered in Washington’s calm tone, rankled. “I have suffered,” he snapped.

Washington shrugged it off. Alexander had the thought that the real general would never have permitted such language without a rebuke. “Your suffering is different,” he said, without further explanation, and then studied his hands, flexing and clenching them, then touching his thumb to the tips of each of his fingers, as if to prove everything still worked. Apparently satisfied, he offered one to Alexander, who instead stood without assistance. His legs felt stronger now, but even so the otherness of the feeling stuck with him, like humidity. 

“Are there many kinds of fae?” He asked. 

“Many kinds,” Washington replied, “It is a competition of great size. Some of obvious elements, like stone and forest and air. Some humans meet in strange ways, like in dreams, or through loss. And some operate in ways humans never see, like fae of time, or fae of magic.” 

“What if you lose? If another fae is the better leader?” 

“The next king or queen has me eliminated, because I am a threat to their rule,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way that pushed Alexander back on the trail of why he’d originally started the conversation. 

Win and become the king of a land that he could barely process. Lose and die. 

It seemed to impossible to consider all at once. He took another breath, feeling his lungs expand and contract. Ha had come here with a purpose and a plan and no vomit or mind-wrenching thought could get him from that. 

He summoned up the drive again, and the knowledge, and the goal. Sure he knew more now, but that was only one of his plans. And if the stakes were truly lose and die, then that put more weight behind Washington to keep things in order, not less. 

If he was taught, could he go to those places he’d seen? Could he process, in some understandable way, all those impossible things? 

He cleared his throat. Washington waited for him to speak. He wished for a glass of water or some beer to wet his throat, but as usual, was underprepared. Nonetheless, the words were there for him, like they always were. 

“If I am your soldier, and I am,” he began, and the question and planned seemed both more and less ridiculous, “Then I should be the best soldier that I can be - you should teach me how to cast spells. I can certainly assist you in this war better doing so, and with such consequences for your failure, you should not make use of every option. Will the council not be impressed by you training a witch? You will show diplomacy towards other magical creatures, and the ability to teach something like me.” 

Again Washington tilted his head, and Alexander hoped, and then the frown pulled the corners of his mouth down in familiar disapproval. “No, I am not going to be your witch-teacher,” he said, “For a number of reasons, but most importantly being that I do not know you to restrain yourself, when the ability presents itself.” 

Alexander pushed forward with all his built up courage. “If you do not teach me, I will attempt to figure it out myself, shooting fireballs off into the distance until your effort is interrupted and disapproved by hunters.” 

While he knew Washington would likely be upset, he could not expect the result. 

Washington scowled like he’d read some letter from congress, and Alexander’s sense flashed hot. It felt as if someone had squeezed his arm too tightly with the intention of pulling him along somewhere. Everything about the general’s demeanor became sharp like jagged stone, and he narrowed his eyes as he spoke through his teeth, in a low, dangerous hiss, “Whatever they would do to me would be a tenth of what they did to you, Colonel Hamilton. You are too ignorant to know what it is you threaten. As my soldier, I explicitly forbid it. And, might I say, any consequences will be far worse than anything another human could do to you.” 

It was not that he had never been around Washington angry before, but something about the hard edge of this was different. Was the anger different because he knew the truth about what Washington was, or was something else there? Even his private angers, that Alexander saw in private, did not have the unhinged, jagged edge of his voice now. 

The British generals, Congress, and inadequate army officers could not actually harm him.Their incompetence could cost him the war and perhaps whatever his life was, only without them knowing. But hunters could actually damage him. They could, the response affirmed, bring this quest to a quick end. 

Alexander forced his knees to be locked. He could not be pushed back by anger or fear. He was accustomed to being in strange places where he did not belong. This could only be another version of that. “A peculiar general who forbids his soldier from finding an edge in a war,” he said.

Washington narrowed his eyes. Alexander blinked and was in the stone cavern again, walls and floor and ceiling grey and glittering, and in the center was the stone man who was and had always been in his general. He took a breath and dust caught in his throat, like tiny crystals in his airways. He coughed, and everything felt dryer and rougher, and air came only in rasps to his lungs. 

“I should kill you,” Washington said, and stood tall over him as he staggered to his knees, still hacking, “For all your brilliance and ingenuity, even by accident, you could draw their attention. All that intelligence and no guide for it is a terrible risk that you now bring to my attention.” 

The world dimmed at the edges as he struggled to breathe. He had once heard a story of a desert wind that had kicked up so much sand there was no air left, and this must have been worse, for it felt the whole ocean wrapped around him and down on him. 

“No,” Washington said, and suddenly he could breathe, and they were on the dirt again, and he was retching for the second time, “You, as you often are, are right, despite my objections. If you do not fear death from hunters or war, then perhaps it will come from learning more about this odd part of yourself.” 

Alexander pushed himself up from the ground and forced his legs to hold him. He pulled Washington’s gaze from where the man was looking at his hands again, touching thumb to each fingertip, “I do not fear death from anything,” he answered, and despite all the confusion he had, he knew this. “If I die to learn more about this thing I am, perhaps I will.” 

Perhaps he would learn how Washington got this time which seemed private and endless. Perhaps he would learn more about that impossible city underground and why Pierre was done with magic and why Washington said he felt strange. 

“We will go Below,” Washington said, “Although I suspect some preparations will be necessary, though perhaps fewer than I originally thought. For now, I have to win this war, and I need you to concentrate on doing so; if I am to train you, you must promise not to let this distract you from a more pressing duty. Are we in agreement?” 

“Yes, sir,” he said, and saluted.

“Good,” Washington said. He reached into his pocket as he began to walk back to the camp, “Before you go to sleep tonight, swallow this.” He offered Alexander another piece of grey stone.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well," he said, coming back over to where Washington sat and, after a moment, sitting in front of him, "What is the first lesson?"

For a while Alexander felt the stone in his hand and thought about it, and then finally he decided that things could hardly be worse, and swallowed it. If he did not eat it, after all, would Washington follow through? It tasted like nothing and felt like swallowing a magnetic force. 

He did not feel it in his chest, like you felt something you ate. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

Pierre had been right about the hunters; Washington had never been like that. Even Washington was angry, he had never been angry with such impossible power behind him. 

But Washington had not only agreed to the scheme because of the threat. Washington saw something odd about him - more odd than all the other things that were generally about him. Something other than the fact that he had woken up and been a witch one day. Something other than he was a bastard orphan from a sugar isle. Something other than he he was an outspoken King’s College attendee. 

There was more, and he could not even figure out how to ask what it was. It was frustrating, to completely lack the vocabulary that you needed. Words had been his entire universe up until last week, and now it seemed that there was something to do but move forward with his feelings and Washington's frowns. 

Had Washington said to go to sleep, afterwards? He had not made any suggestions to their midnight gatherings or anything like that. All he had said was to eat the stone. So Alexander had, and now he laid in his cot and stared at the back of John's head and wished he could explain the situation to him. What even would he say? He would say...

_.... I woke up and noticed the general was the general only to serve his own purpose, and somehow it seemed terrible, but if Washington's goals so completely aligned with his own, was it not worse to leave the army?_

_... I learned there was a whole new universe other than the one I have known my whole life._

_.... I remembered an old dream that I had never known until now, with my mother in it._

John would have the answers, he thought, with a big yawn. John would recommend barging through it, in some impossible way. He shook his head and chuckled as quietly as he could, muted next to Tench's snores. 

He closed his eyes and though more. He would say ... 

_Somehow it is not absurd enough, to wake up one day and be a witch._

It was so much easier to let his mind wander about this instead of the frustrations of the army. Somehow the war did not seem worth his time, despite that it was everything that he needed. Maybe he could become the gentleman he needed through magic. Perhaps if he was a witch he could get property, somehow, and a name, and people would know him. 

What was it like, to be a gentleman witch? Did you enchant your hat to keep clean and your cravat to knot itself? 

He opened his eyes and he was standing in the cave. He staggered back with the surprise of it - with the cave and the weight and the fact that he was standing up. The stone floor was very solid on his backside. 

Washington - stone Washington, slate cut at natural angles instead of skin and cloth - was there. Stone Washington was studying their present location. A natural cavern, Alexander thought, trying to steady his heartbeat. He took in the unhewn floor and walls, with hallways leaning off into some dark unknown where a river trickled outside of his vision. He knew such places existed, but had never been to one before; certainly the stone of their hearths came from quarries somewhere in the distance. Had Washington transported them there, somehow? Had that stone he swallowed allowed Washington to pull him to some distant land without his acknowledgement? 

Then he noticed that while it was light enough to see - a murky early dawn, grey but certainly seeable - there was no sky above them. He glanced at his hands and feet and saw his full uniform despite that he had undressed before going to bed; he even had his sabre and his pistol. 

"Where are we?" He asked the back of Washington, who had crouched next to a jagged stone spike rising from the ground. 

"The nature of where is complicated," Washington answered, standing and turning back to him, "In summary, presume that you have a different part of your spirit than your body, and with some skill is not challenging to separate them. Your body may follow specific rules and require circumstances for the results it needs, whereas the circumstances and rules your spirit follows are quite different." 

"And that is why I am dressed?" 

Washington nodded. "Very observant. Yes. Your spirit thinks you should have a body, so you do. And your spirit imagines the body you wear right now, and imagines you dressed, and armed. If you were militia, and impressed only by the need to be in the army, your spirit might instead imagine you in your farmer's or blacksmith's clothes." A wry smile. "It seemed you are more a soldier than a clerk." 

It was never strange enough. Alexander stood, brushing strange dust off his uniform. He took in his hands and his jacket and ran his fingers through his hair. It all _felt_ very real, at least. Then again, Washington had always seemed so human.  
Focus, Alexander. The panic will do you no good. He squeezed his eyes open and shut again, trying to make the connections in his head. "We are in this place because we cannot alert hunters or the army?" 

Washington did not quite smile, but it was close. “As astute as ever. Yes, exactly. An additional benefit is that you are much less likely to accidentally kill yourself, as the spirit body has different strengths and weaknesses than the real body. Time is much more flexible in this place, although I think we should still have sessions, and not spend a timeless eternity learning about you." He paused for a beat. “I suppose if I were to select anyone for your circumstances, a far worse choice could be made." 

There was a silence. Alexander thought again of how much it feel like all his tools had deserted him. The pen had always served him so effectively; he had know all the things to say and how to say them, and appreciated how the essay looked when stretched across the page. He felt more and more like he had been dropped in an impossible new country with folk completely unlike him and had been given just the faintest hint of an inaccessible vocabulary and all the incredible ways that vocabulary could be used. 

"Sit," Washington said, and gestured, and Alexander luckily turned to see the chair, before he opened his mouth to point out the lack of furniture. 

"Can you make anything?" 

"Not anything," Washington said, "But things can generally be made easily, as they are formed out of spiritstuff rather than material items. Instead of those materials, what you require to make things is intricate knowledge of the thing. Chairs have little complexity." A beat. "Regardless, if you are to be taught like a stone fae, you should know the meaning of it." 

He sat. The chair was very solid under him. It was made out of the same material of the rest of the cave, and was well-fit for him. He found often that chairs were never quite the right height, and that was not a problem here.

Washington knelt in front of him and pressed a flat, carved hand to the stone floor. He closed his eyes - Alexander marveled, if only for an instant, at the impossibility and existence of stone eyelids - before he was distracted by something his sense did. It was as if he had never tasted wine or grapes or fruit before and someone had given him port. 

He was happy the chair was there under him. He was certain he would have lost his footing at the feeling. 

"You felt it. Good." Washington said. Words suddenly seemed so surface and important. Whatever Washington did - was doing still, right now, playing some equivalent of piano music for his sense - “You call this magic, but we do is not magic. This is a secret - a stone secret. It is older than magic. Before the smallest insect crawled across the desert, there was stone, and there will be stone long after it. And so the stone learns, if learning can be expanded to something larger than it ever was. If you are to be taught like a stone fae, you will focus on understanding those secrets. You will be given puzzles by the earth and solve them for knowledge. Stone does not think or know in the way that you, or even I, do. And so this is part of the challenge, to take what you are given and find a way to process it and move forward." 

“I can solve puzzles,” he said, because he hardly knew else to say. 

“So I’ve seen.” 

Alexander felt something in his sense change. There was something more focused about it - intent. The sense - the power - was looking at him. Looking at him inasmuch as a thing could do, without eyes. "Are you making it talk to me?" 

"Yes," Washington said, "I thought it would be impossible, as it was known that stone fae are the only ones who can hear stone, and stone can hear it. But given how easily I was able to impress the summary of my coming to be here, I thought it to be worth a try.” 

For once, Alexander did not want to respond. He suddenly saw no reason to talk much at all. Oh, sure, he could express his ideas, and shout down his enemies, and bring understanding and truth and his opinions to the masses. And yes, there was much for him to share with the world. He was sure, though, that none of that could hold a handle - or a boulder, if you would - to what the earth had to say to him. 

"But," he said, suddenly, opening his eyes, "Is this not my thoughts? Have we not imagined this place? Then how I can really learn from the stone, if the stone is not actually here?" 

Washington leaned back from where he sat on the stone floor, hands on his knees. He looked uncharacteristically at peace, which was somehow stranger than his lack of color. The familiar worry and anxiety had smoothed out of his face, and his brow, ironically enough, had lightened. "You did not imagine this place. This place has always been here, and will be after you have left it. Just because it is not a physical place does not mean it is not a real place." He paused for a moment, "Imagine if all the things you have seen before now are in one sphere - a plane, it is called. Your plane is usually called the physical plane, as it is very strictly held to physical laws, and those laws are strictly enforced. But there are many other planes,with different laws, or no laws at all. Here, you may do, feel, or be something that does not obey the laws of the physical plane, and it is not so much of a threat to yourself or otherwise." 

Alexander rubbed his hands over his eyes to try and get himself concentrating on seeing instead of the sense. He stood from the chair and paced in a circle around it. He took in the high ceilings and the hard floors and chewed his lip. "So the point of us being here is so we don’t have to worry about those laws, or their enforcement.”

That had to have meant hunters. 

“And to avoid the pressure of time commitments, as time is not static between planes. Here, it moves quite slowly." 

Alexander took a deep breath of calm, cool air. It should have been sharp, in a place like this. He was not sure what was the worse thing: that he was far from anyone he had ever known, for some definition of far, or that something about him leant him an easy calm. Had it been the sense, which soothed his panic? Was it Washington, sitting on the ground and seeming more at ease than any time Alexander had known him? "Well," he said, coming back over to where Washington sat and, after a moment, sitting in front of him, "What is the first lesson?" 

“I will guide you to it.” 

Alexander sat up straight. 

Washington stood. “Stand,” he said, gesturing. Alexander stood. Washington took two steps, until they were close enough that Alexander could see the intricacies of his carved skin. 

“Do not be afraid,” Washington said, and wrapped his arms around Alexander. He pulled him close in what was in arguable a cool, sharp hug.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thought perhaps he should have felt terror, upon having no body, but he felt disorientingly like he was how he should be, where he should be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i guess updates will be unpredictable now? sorry. but there is a lot more story written. i'm just a lazy human being.

It was a strange hug, because now all things were strange relating to Washington, and his body, and this place. In some ways, it was exactly how he might imagine It was hard, exactly he would have imagined being pressed against a living statue might feel like. Washington’s body was cool to the touch, like granite.

In some ways, it was exactly as he might have imagined it might be to be this close to a statue. Yet, the description did not even come close to what it actually felt like. The sense hummed in him like a fly next to his ear, in the least annoying way possible. It hummed like relief, if that was possible. It felt like reaching the edge of some bluff and seeing your destination just at the bottom. It felt like home, although Alexander had never had a home in the way other soldiers did. The place where he grew up with had always been one moment from disaster, and felt like it. Every place after that had been tinged with one horror to the next. Even his bed at the college reminded him that there was much to lose, if he lapsed in his stomach. 

Other soldiers talked about their homes and their wives and the utter ease of stepping in their doorways. He found it hard to imagine up until this very instant. He knew, now. Other soldiers said they would come inside their homes and sag into chairs, and now he sagged into Washington's solid form, which comforted him in ways he did not understand and, somehow, could not bear to lose. 

The Why? formed only briefly in his mind, and then they did something. 

Afterwards he would explain it as some sort of drop, as if you were standing on a rotting floor that fell out under your weight, but it was not like that. It was abrupt, yes, but there was no sort of terror. And while he was sure they were going down in some way, it was not only just down. They went _Under_. They went _Below._

Now he understood what it meant when Washington said you could go places without your body. Below, you did not have a form. You could not have a form. You were part of stone. You were linked too densely to have something individual; your you could not be linked to anything other than your spirit. 

He thought perhaps he should have felt terror, upon having no body. He could not see, and yet felt none of the helplessness of being blind; he could not hear, and felt not of the cluelessness of being deaf. 

Perhaps worse and most dominating of all, he felt disorientingly like he was how he should be, where he should be.

 _Alexander_ , hummed his sense. No, not his sense. Washington. Washington shared Below with him, somehow. They were separate and together all at once; though they had no forms there was some difference of spirit. 

_Do not speak. I will teach you later._ Washington said-felt-sensed at him. _Instead try to_ listen _. It is not hearing. We are communing with stone. It will impart knowledge to you, if you can digest it._

He focused on how normal this felt when he knew it should have been terrifying. A part of him, some part that was eternally othered, felt at ease. That was the step to learn the Washington - this stone - could tell him. Why was it easy to feel comfortable with no body, in a place that could not be seen or felt or heard? 

He reached with some part of him and heard with the threads of soul. There were things like voices, indistinct. He heard the murmur of a crowd and found he could not separate one call from another. He heard every conversation at once; some were distressed and some were pleased and some were matter of fact. It reminded him of the pure chaos of the docks - there was agony, and pleasure, and business, and success, and failure, and the world as usual. That was the nature of stone, was it not? It was created violently, and then calmed, and then eternal. Ground down and crushed together and melt, and circled.

Did they speak to him, like it seemed? One if Alexander's weaknesses, he was told, was that he always felt people were talking to him when they were just talking. He reached out with whatever he has left and tried to untangle the threads of chatter, as if you could hear one rock falling in an avalanche. It sounded like they wanted his help. It sounded like they needed him. It sounded like they we're beggars and he was weathly. 

He knew the pitch of the beggar better than anything. He swore he would never, and yet, he had. He had told hinself then that he would always give to the beggar, when he could.

 _What is it?_ he asked, without his mouth. _What can I give you?_

The crowd-avalanche-mountain said a thousand things - too many things for him to understand. How could he sidle up to one conversation? 

_One at a time,_ he requested, and he heard the crush of stone on stone, and even then he could not discern one rumbling pebble from the next.  
He would have been there forever had something not pulled him away. _Pulled_ was too generous. He was ripped away, like a piece chipped from an axe. He was carved off. 

When he came back to his body, and had real senses and real flesh - somehow limiting, now that he knew there could be something else - he was in his bedroom in headquarters. He staggered, remmebering legs, and went downstairs, but Washington was gone.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It is quite unusual that a fae might force a witch to hear the secrets of the deep earth, like shoving a man’s head under water.” 
> 
> "It felt like home to me."

He knew at first that Washington had expected some different experience because the general did not talk to him about stone or magic or anything outside of the war for several days. It was not that there was some lack of things about the war to talk about - some discussion about going south to Virginia, arguments about taking back New York, discussions of how to move the army next and what England’s future plants might be. 

One day he had asked for a moment of Washington’s time and gotten it, but when he said  _ about the stone _ , his throat was suddenly filled with choking dust, so much so that one of the guards had asked if he was okay, and Washington stepped away. 

He had shouted without thinking:  _ Come back here, you stone monster!  _

What he had said: “I have no interest in collecting a coup of chickens!” 

This made the men that surrounded him more interested in his welfare, not less. 

He could not reproduce what had happened. He sat in his bedroom and tried to sink and nothing happened. He went outside, and took off his shoes so he could feel the dirt and thought to himself down, down, down,  _ down _ . All that happened was that some misbehaving soldiers staggered upon him and mocked how foolish he looked before realizing his rank. 

Washington could not make him forget the stone voices-not-voices that begged him for help. Washington could not make him forget how it had felt to go to that place. Washington could not ignore away how  _ home  _ it had felt. It felt like their home on the island and his mother had just baked something delicious. He heard no whips and felt no bugs, and yet it was home. 

Home replicated in an impossible space. 

He could not go back to it, like he could not go back to the island.

He gave it four days before he would start making a scene.  Washington did have an impossible war to win, after all. Washington had to win the war because that was how Washington would prove to some strange-bodied, incomprehensible council that he was a good leader. As if his leadership already did not prove such a thing, Alexander thought. This council obviously required results and not process. If you were a king, what was more important that process? Did the council not care about the current failings of the British monarchy and seen these results? 

He thought about it during the wee hours of the morning and the night, and set the countdown, and went back to the war. He argued with Congress and other soldiers and ran around delivering orders and reproduced letters. He wrote and wrote and wrote, and sometimes he rode to somwhere else to dispatch the orders he wrote, and sometimes he heard about battles which he felt slightly less angry about not being in.

On the night of the second day - three days since had had gone below - he was woken by thoughts that were not his. He was asleep, and the rest of the room was filled with snores, and the rest of them must have not heard it. 

_ Hamilton!  _

He was whispered. Magic-whispered, if such a thing was even possible. Magic whispered by someone distressed, and after two confused moments of staring at the ceiling he realized there was really only person it could be. 

_ It is Pierre. Come outside and talk to me. You will alert no one.  _

He grunted a complaint at the ceiling and wiggled himself out of bed. The longer the voice had gone on, the more alarmed it had sounded. It seemed unlikely that Pierre would be magic-whispering him anything about the war, and the concluding result put a little energy in his step as he manuevered around the sleeping aides, put on some of his clothes, and snuck down the steps of the headquarters. Harrison was even awake, but looked through him when he went past, like he was not there at all. 

Alexander knew that he was unkempt at the present moment; he had been asleep, and had not done his hair or his beard or his clothes; he was not wearing his jacket and his shirt was not properly tucked; he was certain he looked like no amount of coffee could move the bags from his eyes.  His disorganization was nothing in comparison to Pierre’s, who looked as if he had just escaped some capture. His eyes were wild and terrified, and his jacket and neckcloth were disarray. He was not wearing his wig. He was hopping up and down all the balls of his feet, when when Alexander appeared, Pierre stared at him for several long moment, looking him up and down. 

In the face of such mania, he was not sure exactly what to do. Luckily, he was not required to, for Pierre grabbed Alexander’s shirt and jerked up his sleeve to reveal his forearm, then dropped it and took a step. 

“What are you?” Pierre asked, staring at him like he’d grown a second head. 

The Frenchman could not have known the intensity of the question when he asked it. He asked it in the pragmatic way, not in the impossible way you looked in the mirror and could not decide what it was that looked back. He reached down to button the sleeve again, letting his confusion show. “I am a witch,” he said, “Did we not address this already? Has something happened to you?”

Pierre laughed an unpleasant, slightly mad laugh. “You are no witch I have ever read about,” he said, and then he pulled up his own sleeve to reveal a slender forearm that, unlike Alexander’s, had a scar that was probably six inches long. 

The scar was pebbly and grey.

“What did Washington do to you?” Alexander asked, looking around as if Washington would appear and submit to his questioning, “Are you injured?” 

Another hysterical laugh. “He tried to make me go Below. Deep places are for deep beings like stone fae, and not witches. More powerful witches have been killed or driven mad trying to comprehend them. Stone fae know this. They tend to be covetous of those relationships. They are told deep secrets. It is quite unusual that one might force a witch to hear them, like shoving a man’s head under water.” 

Pierre let a moment pass, evidently trying to gather himself. He took a deep breath, and then spoke again in the puzzled silence. “Is that what happened to you?” 

There was a difference between being overwhelmed by the impossibility of everything that was occuring in your life in comparison to being overwhelmed by the suddenly madness pf a very reasonable Frenchman who you liked despite recent events. Alexander cleared his throat and fixed the button of his sleeve. “No,” He answered, after a moment, “I….In fact I thought the voices were comfortable. They wanted something from me, but I was not able to identify what it was. It was like they were speaking to me from underwater. II did not feel drowned or crushed by being Below. Somehow I felt relaxed by it, as much as one could feel relaxed about having no body.”  

Pierre laughed again. This was not a mad laugh. This was a resigned laugh, familiar as it was. The laugh said _I cannot believe that this is the truth_ , and yet here it is. It was the laugh he usually laughed when Congress gave some particularly absurd report. Pierre was usually pretty positive about the war; it was strange to hear him use that laugh.

The Frenchman glanced off into the darkened camp and then back at Alexander, folding his arms behind his back and running his hands through his un-wigged hair. “I have heard stories from my old tutors about realignments changing people in ways they could not believe, but I always believed those stories to be exaggerated.” 

Something about it irked Alexander immensely. “I am still myself, Mr. Du Ponceau, no matter what mysterious qualities I may have acquired, or what they are called. I have done well for myself despite my irregularities, as numerous as they are. It is interesting, however, that despite that you have excused yourself from helping me with my new state, it has not excluded you from waking me in the middle of the night to tell me how unusual I am. At least Washington has attempted to teach me something.” 

The retort hit. Pierre took a step back and cleared his throat. “There are reasons I am hesitant to intervene.” 

Later Alexander would feel bad that it felt like an opening and that he had to strike, but right now the madness and frustration of the past week was hot under his skin and saw the opening, like a vent. “If you must keep me awake, the time would be better spent telling me your reasons than proclaiming I belong in an exhibit.” 

Another blow well-struck. At least it seemed to have driven the madness from the man entirely. “Fine,” he said, with a bit of a snap, as if Alexander had done something wrong, “I was born a witch; my mother was a witch as well. She placed me in a school that had served her well. She as well as I specialized in the magic of speech and language. My teachers and I had a dispute about both the use of magic and of teaching philosophy, and…..” He paused, and Alexander heard something tight in his voice. “...I learned that there is a reason there is not much dispute about magic in France. So I fled. Later, the baron and I found each other. He did not know what he protected me from, a time or two. He came here, so I came here.” 

 

“You knew Washington was stone fae when you arrived?” 

 

“Before I arrived. He - it - is an exceptionally powerful creature. Even on the ocean could I feel the beginnings of his strength. By that time, it was too late to convince the Baron to adventure instead to China or the Indies. Generally, fae are best avoided. They care very little about obstacles, incidental or otherwise, to their task, so there is great danger in accidentally finding oneself in the path of one.” 

“If Washington is so powerful,” Alexander asked, “Why does he not just drop the British army into a chasm? He could end the whole war in an instant.”  

“I asked him that.” 

“And he said?” 

“When he is fae king, he will not be able to drop any fae that oppose him into a chasm.” Pierre shook his head. “The point of him being here is to prove he can win this war, and defeat the British, and create a new country, on the terms of the people he pretends to be a part of.” 

Alexander processed this. He wished that he had a chair to sit in. He wished that they could have this conversation in the middle of the day in the office, where he could be drinking coffee and exchanging theories with John. He wished, at the same time, that the war would return to it’s previous level of complication, and not have added in magic, witches, fae, and foreign crowns, more so than they already existed. 

It all did make a strange, impossible kind of sense. 

“This is his audition,” he said, and PIerre nodded.  

Part of it was enraging. If this theory was correct, than to Washington, the war and this country and the Tories and everyone who lived and died for this cause - like him - was just a stepping stone for his greater ambition. Every step Washington had taken, he took because it was useful to his own cause. He was not really sacrificial at all. 

And yet, Washington was good at this, and helpful to the cause. If Washington had not taken up the mantle, who would their general even had been? 

Alexander  bit down on his lip. The thoughts tangled up in his mind and made it impossible to figure out what to say first. He wanted to shout at Washington for being self-serving when he pretended otherwise even if the result was advantageous; he wanted Pierre to try to make everything make sense; he wanted something resembling normalcy back; he wanted to understand whatever he was now. At the same time he wanted Washington to open a chasm under the British army and end the war tomorrow, even if it meant the arrival of some horror-police to make things look normal. He wanted his mother to appear in the middle of the army so he could ask questions about what he was and why he was like this and why he had never known. He wanted to hear John and Tench and Robert’s theories on everything. 

He sat down in the grass in front of headquarters and rubbed his face with his hand. Pierre sat down across from him and offered him a sympathetic smile. It was impossible to figure out what to focus on first. He was some kind of abnormal thing who felt at home at stone when usually it killed people or witches or whatever he was supposed to be and, yet again, was not; Washington used this war only to show how capable he was; Pierre was a refugee from an abusive master who tried to slaughter him for his disagreement.  

These things fought for space in his head along with everything else in the war. There was not enough room in his mind for all of it, and all of this nonsense had the added difficulty with it of being so peculiar. 

There was a long moment of quiet. Real quiet, not army quiet, because PIerre somehow could do this without pinching his sense. Pierre could make a bubble where they talked in the middle of the night and no one saw or heard them. 

“When I first discovered him, he was doing some kind of magic behind headquarters,” he said, finally. “He was surprised that I could see him and that I had come to bother him.” 

“It is not surprising at all, that you were bothering the general.”  Pierre retorted, and despite everything Alexander laughed. “The reason it is interesting is because he probably put up spells that would have suggested to you it was a good idea to be somewhere else. I suppose your reaction to these shields may have been sent awry by the celestial re-allignment, when it made you into whatever you are now.”

“He was doing magic when I found him on the first day. Even though he is so powerful, he has magical enemies?” 

Pierre nodded. “Some of them, I imagine, do not know why the resistance they face is so stiff.  If I was British witch in the isles and wondered why resistance to my magic was so stiff, and you told me it was because General Washington was a stone fae, I would expect a less outlandish lie, even if the magic does resemble fae magic.”  He smiled a grim little smile.”Certainly some have come here only to realize it. Maybe they go back to the island and their compatriots do not even believe them.” 

“The magic he does in the middle of the night is to compete against them, but none of them can actually simply call down hellfire on the other because of hunters. They must go on with these subtleties.” 

It was all the most ridiculous thing he had ever imagined. All of this power between the groups, only able to be used in these absurd ways. Only the memory of Washington lashing out of him about the hunters made him believe they were as bad as anyone said. 

What he wanted above all else was a pen. If he could only write it all down, it would make sense. He could find connections and reveal missing steps and try to connect the pieces in ways that this conversation alone could not assist him with. If he could only get it down in an essay, and then maybe he could show the essay to someone else, and there would be a discussion, and he would understand more about this thing he staggered into, blind and confused. If he could only just break the impossible new universe down, paragraph by paragraph, thought by thought, he would have answers. At least he would have questions, which he could then generate answers to. 

First steps, he told himself. Small steps, despite how unlike him it was. Pierre didn’t have the big answers he needed; Pierre actually seem even more baffled by the questions about what he was than anyone else, even if he understood more about Washington and the bigger universe. Pierre had some magic, but fled before he learned all of it. 

There, that was the first step. Pierre had some magic he did not have, that maybe would be useful. They were in a better connection now, about Washington and the war. 

He took a deep breath. The air filled his lungs, warm and comforting. Resolutely, he stood, and Pierre followed him to his feet. Then, he ventured a try: 

“Can you at least teach me to talk into someone else’s mind, like you did to me?” 

Pierre thought about this for a moment. He did not, to Alexander’s pleasure, immediately shut down or snap at him. He looked very much like he was considering it.  “I think it unwise to teach how I was taught, but I am happy to be practiced on. I notice you are controlling your aura better - it is like that only your aura is a lecture hall, and you are lecturing to a single person. It is like shouting, only in your mind. I am fairly accustomed to it, so do not feel as if you could disturb me.” 

It was better than nothing. Furthermore, he did not need to do outside in the middle of the night. 

“May I go back to bed now?” he asked, shooting for playful despite everything, and Pierre laughed. 

“If there is nothing else, you are dismissed, Colonel,” Pierre said. Alexander gave him a lazy salute and Pierre gave him one back. It still all made zero sense and yet he felt better. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John tilted his head and put the report he was summarizing to the side. "Share. Perhaps I can shed some light." 
> 
> When he tried --

So he was not a witch, or he was an impossibly defective witch, or at least a witch not unlike any other witch. Pierre had confessed to being half-educated about everything, yes, but even so, the way Pierre had looked at him and told him he was not a witch was painfully, horribly familiar. 

He should have felt used to it, being told he was nothing like anyone else. He should have been used to that look of confusion. He should have been used to that look that said _you are not one of us_ , and yet. 

It hurt less from Washington, who was obviously and completely an outsider in ways that were almost impossible to think about. But Pierre -- Wasn’t Pierre like him? Pierre was a young man in this war for all kinds of reasons, like him. Pierre was a witch, like him. Only not. 

In his solitude, he could not pretend he did not long for the stone voices and the impossible nothingness of being Below. _They_ did not see some lack in him. He was sure, in some way, that they needed him. They took him in. It was impossible. How could he be like -- them? It? Washington? 

Naturally, of course, he could not get back to them. It was a perfectly Alexander Hamilton story. Thrust him into some impossible situation and make everything strange and like nothing he had ever seen. Then, find the one thing that made sense, and make it the most inaccessible and peculiar thing. 

"Scouting reports have done a very great harm to Hamilton in his past life," Laurens said, from next to him. Alexander looked down at the report he was holding and noted with a scowl that he'd ripped the paper, though it was still legible if he put the pieces back together. He sighed and turned the paper over, lighting a candle and dropping a bit of wax to hold the two halves together. 

"My mind is elsewhere," He responded. He took a deep breath, "It is that only a few nights ago I saw a very strange thing and I am still having trouble figuring it out what it is." 

John tilted his head and put the report he was summarizing to the side. "Share. Perhaps I can shed some light." 

Could he? What had happened with Knox was still vivid in his memory. And yet, Washington was not here. He did not really even have to include Washington in the explanation, really. It would not occur to John to get that detail, he was sure. 

"Well," he began, and leaned in just a little, "A few nights ago, there was a ---" 

Then he felt something. 

The world went black, but it was not the calm, comforting black of below. This blackness was void. Where the stone had been everything, pressed to an impossible density, he was -- 

\-- nowhere. He was made of nothing and in a space lacking in even the smallest particles. 

This black hid under your bed, when you were a child.

In the void there was a feeling that was like being squeezed in a claw. He was a fish, and some seabird had caught him mid-leap and was winging away to make him dinner. 

_DO NOT,_ boomed the void that was the seabird. the seabird that had him in it's claws. The voice was like thunder, but the thunder was in him, vibrating in the marrow of his bones and settled into the folds of his brain. The voice was in his sense, under his fingernails, in his blood. 

_Voice_ was impossibly limiting to describe it. “Voice” described it like the ocean was a large bathtub and suffering occurred in the war.

 _HE IS IGNORANT_ , said his blood and his bones and his magic and the void and the seabird, _ONE MERCY WILL BE GRANTED, THUS, FOR EXPERIENCE._

Then the seabird and the void were gone but the voice was still in his blood and John was waiting for him to talk, as if nothing had happened. 

_do not_ , sung his blood. 

_do not_ , said an impossible breeze in the room. 

_do not_ , said the flickering light of the fire in the hearth.

"I suppose it's nothing," his mouth said, without him moving it. 

John rolled his eyes. “Secret it is then. Although if it bothers you, you know I will listen. Unless you would prefer to shred letters?”

He forced a laugh that must have sounded more authentic to Laurens than him, because the man turned back to the letter he was writing. _Do not,_ said the letter, over and over again.

He thought himself generally not a believer in many of the strange forces others attributed to the world, and thus did not fear them. It was one thing to not fear something you could not see. It was another to feel like something had plucked you out of the universe and threatened you. It was another thing to know your general was a magical stone being and you were some kind of defective witch. 

Alexander was powered by fear in many, many ways. He used it to move forward. And yet how pointlessly insignificant he had been, at that one second…

"John," he said, in the most even voice he could manage, "I am going to have one of the doctors dispatch me a tonic; I am feeling queer." 

"Nothing that will make you too distractible," John replied, though he was clearly not really listening.

As if he could be more distracted at this point. Everything seemed to spiral further and further, and made it harder and harder to concentrate on the end. He needed this war; he needed to work; he needed to distinguish himself; he needed to be seen as heroic. He did not need to be seen as a man who shirked his duties. Sure, Washington would pretend that he was not idle, but Washington was not the only man that it was advisable to curry favor with. And Washington was going to disappear after the war anyway - maybe Washington was less valuable than ever. Maybe, after Washington told him more about whatever he was, he would request an assignment south or otherwise. Funny, that he had turned down General Knox a long time ago, but at least Knox considered the war something more important than just a pawn, and at least Knox would be around to reward him after the war was done. 

He did have to go to the medical tent, because he was certain that John would wish to gossip with the doctors about him later, and he did not want to be a liar. Then he took a step and fell. 

And fell, and fell, and fell. 

He hit very firm ground so hard felt his teeth rattle. For a moment he laid there in a daze, and he was able to focus on his surroundings. He was Below. He took in stone ceilings and unnatural light from nowhere and unhewn walls. He sat up slowly and looked around, but there was no Washington with him. He wanted to explore this strange place. He wanted to see if he could speak to the stones again. He wanted to see if this place could do magic. He wanted to go to the doctor's for something to ease his confusion. He wanted to learn something. He wanted --

The puzzle that the world had twisted like he was drunk. He felt another retch in his throat, but he swallowed back down the vomit and forced himself to his feet. His saber felt good in his hand, even though it was worthless. Even the pretending of control worked. 

"You brought me here, so show yourself!" he shouted, even he hoped no impossible things appeared, too big for his mind to process, to unnatural for him to understand, to alien to exist, "I wil! I will!" 

"You will not," said a furious hiss behind him, and suddenly his entire body felt like a load of bricks. He hit the ground again and felt his head bounce off the slate. 

Washington was standing over him, where nothing had been. Washington was stone now, and even more stone than ever. Previously, Washington had looked like a statue of himself, in all the exquisite detail. Now he looked more like a pre-carved lump, as if the piece of slate had just arrived from the quarry and had yet to be sculpted. There was the line of shoulders and things that would be feet, but the face had been ground away, and there was nothing that suggested clothes, flesh or muscle. 

He knew it was Washington because it felt like Washington. 

"You are coming dangerously close to being more trouble than you are worth," Washington said, in the even voice he used when he had only the barest threads of control of his temper. No mouth split the uncarved round of his head when he spoke; it sounded more like rumbling stones or crashing boulders than Washington. "What did you try to do me?" 

“What?” 

There was a strange moment of calm. Alexander felt the pressure on him ease; he stood, quickly. Despite the fall he’d taken he did not seem to have any of the dizziness such a head wound usually carried; of course this place and this body didn’t follow any rules. He drew his pistol even though he was sure it was pointless. At least if he was going to be killed by an otherworldly being that pretended to be a general, they could say he was fighting. 

_They_ Alexander thought, suppressing the bitter laugh, as if they would know. Washington would make sure he was forgotten, wouldn’t he? 

"Why did you try to do to me?" Washington repeated, more like a voice and less like a mountain rumble. 

"To you?" He finally managed, lowing the pistol in his moment of confusion, "Nothing." 

"You lie to me at your own peril." 

Out of everything, that grit the most. "Lie to you?" he said, and felt the volume of his voice slip out of his control. It was like the final push. "Over the last week or two I have discovered my general is a stone monster, that I have recently become some secret witch, learned impossible places and seen impossible things and never been allowed to utter a word of it, and your sense is under all of this impossibility and nonsense and insanity, I would lie to you? Here?" A wild gesture to the cavern. "How could i possibly come to the conclusion that would be a useful thing to do? How could I possibly, in the base depths of the ignorance of which you know I am currently situated in, in the complete isolation and bafflement of my situation - consider that!?" 

Of course - and somehow it was worse than ever - Washington was unperturbed by his shouting. What happened was that Washington (there was no other word for it) sharpened. The mountain carved itself into Washington's jacket and boots and smallpox scars across his forehead. "Yes," he said, from a new mouth. 

"Yes?!" 

Washington bowed his head. "Please accept my apologies. I did not intend to attack your character in such a manner." Then he sat in a chair that had not previously been there, and folded his arms in his lap. "I will tell you why, and hope you understand the context. Would you sit?" 

"I do not want your magic chairs," Alexander spat. It was too much, that you could simply want to tell your friend about all the insane things that happened to you and then giant voices and claws were all around you and then you were teleported off into strange places and disciplined by your alien general. "I do not want any of this. I want to merely be myself again. I want to be Alexander Hamilton. I do not want to be a witch. I do not want you to be a stone. I want everything to be the way it was.” 

In between blinks, they were back in Washington's office, and Washington sitting at his private study desk, and Alexander was standing there. 

"Is that any better?" Washington asked, and he just the general again. "We may even be interrupted. It will be just how things always have been." A wry twitch of his lip. 

It was worse. Sure it was terrible that you could be teleported off into mysteriou caverns that did not exist, and you could be turned into a children's story witch, and your general could be a stone alien. But that it could all be disappeared, like some kind of joke, as if it was all just an elaborate way to make him go mad -- 

He slumped onto the ground. The wooden boards were hard under him; he was sure there would be a bruise on his tailbone later. It was hard to care about things like real pain, when it was so normal. There were so many more impossible things to care about it. All the words wanted to escape at once. They reached his throat and fought, and surged in his stomach and vibrated in his fingers. He buried his face in the crooks of his elbows and the _least_ pathetic thing about it was that he was laying in a ball in the general’s office -- 

"Hamilton!" Washington shouted, and the world shuddered, and he had the sense of being held, even if Washington stayed at his desk and he just kept on laying on the floor. 

The door slammed open. Alexander watched boots thud into the room. 

"Leave us," Washington snapped to the guard, as Alexander slowly sat up. He felt impossibly drained. It was worse than riding all night or laying in a mud heap in the middle of a firefight. He felt like bottle that someone had held upside down and tipped every last bit of water out. He stared at his legs and wondered if he could use them to stand. 

"Your Excellency, the whole camp shook," said one of the guards, just above him but seeing quite far away, "And headquarters especially. We thought something had happened." 

"Shook?" Washington asked, "Are we being mortared?" 

"The scouts looked and saw nothing, but everyone was certain of the shake. The colonel even lost his footing.” A hand reached down to him, and he was tired enough to let it pull him to his feet. Said feet worked well enough to put him in a chair. 

"Take Colonel Laurens with you to see if anything has suffered significantly, and have him report back when you feel you have a strong understanding of whether there is an long-term harm. 

"But, sir," said the other voice, the one that had helped Alexander. Alexander knew his name, but was too tired to remember it, "Why did the whole camp shake?" 

"It is much more important to consider the future, and not the past, sir," Washington said, "And this why is not so valuable, if there was no harm done by it. Dismissed." 

There was a beat, and then there were footsteps, and the door closing. Then silence. 

"Have you ever heard of a Wreck, Colonel?" Washington. Thoughtful. 

Alexander, with immense effort, pulled his head out of his hands and let it rest against the wall behind the chair. The awkwardness hurt already, but he was too exhausted to care. It took a moment to realize he was supposed to respond, and that whatever a Wreck was, it was another new thing, because there could never be enough new things. 

"Not like a ship, I presume," he murmured, preferring to take in the wooden beams of the ceiling. Even though every inch of his body was drained, his eyes wouldn't close. Now was the time to go to med tent for that tonic, he thought, and was too tired to laugh. 

"If you build a cannon, and then attempt to take it apart again, you will have an incredibly dysfunctional piece of iron, and any attempts to make that cannon work again will likely end catastrophically. The same can be said for magic. Many works - spells, if you will - are designed to be temporary. But very powerful creatures can design works that, once cast, last for a very, very long time, and can be very challenging to dispel or reverse. In the case one of these spells is modified, the results are very unpredictable." 

"If it would not upset you, sir," Alexander said, to the ceiling, "Could we move directly to the importance of this explanation?” 

"I believe your strangeness is a result of some magic that was Wrecked within, around, or related to you. That Wreck could have caused you to interact differently with stone and witch magic.” Alexander opened his mouth to comment, but Washington spoke again, after a pause. “Especially after that not unimpressive shudder. For a witch, such a thing should take quite a bit of study, I imagine. At it’s core, such a thing is for my kind. But say one is somehow both, and very distressed by a number of seemingly impossible changes - such an event is not impossible.” 

There was another silence between them. This time the words had processed fast - too fast. He knew instantly what Washington meant, and wished he didn’t. 

Amazing, that he had spent several nights trying to light candles with his mind or tie his shoes with no hands, and all he’d need was the exact moment when it became impossible to process everything and he could shake the whole camp. 

All he wanted was to pretend he was sitting in the office with the other aides and they were trading ridiculous theories on what had just happened. Instead he knew that this had come from within him somehow - that he was a monster. 

Alexander let his head slump into his hands. He had no words to describe his thoughts. It could not be bad enough to wake up and learn everything was not as it seemed; he had to also be the defective result of some failed magic. 

His entire life he had been a seeker of truth. He knew sometimes the truth was an ugly thing, hideous and malformed, and that sometimes the disgust you had with the truth only was associated with how strongly you were required, as a just being, to change it. Oh, he had known some horrible truths about his fellow man at the docks, and in college, and now this war. 

He knew men that pretended not to know the truth and had loathed them. He knew men who he knew were aware of the horrors that lay beneath the surface of their comfortable lives and steadfastly looked over, around or away from that truth. Alexander had railed against those people. 

Never had he wanted more than to pretend everything was normal, and things were as they always were. God, if he could only wake up and Washington be only the stern general and he only a bastard orphan from a sugar island. In comparison, he'd practically been identical to the plantation nobility. 

He was a defective cannon that he had accidentally briefly lit. Short of a full explosion, he could not imagine much worse. 

He was not like Pierre. He was not even like Washington. He was the only defective thing here, like a failed result on a press. The quake had taken all the energy out of him that he might have needed to consider any alternative views of this result. 

He heard the sound of footsteps and Washington stepped into vision and looked at him. The worn lines of his face, the steely blue of his eyes, the pox scars across his cheeks - all fake. The softening frown - fake. The faint glimmer of light off his brass buttons - fake. 

“I think it best I escort you to your room and indicate that you are ill and should not be disturbed,” Washington said. HIs voice - fake. The touch on his shoulder was firm, but it was soft like skin that was not really there. 

Alexander gathered his strength. “Sir,” he said, and finally let his neck hold his head, so he stared instead at leather breeches (fake) and the blue jacket (fake), “Can you make it so I see you true self, while you hide from those you must hide from?” 

Washington crouched, so that they could again make eye contact. “Yes, such a thing is possible.” 

“Dispense with this lie, if you would,” Alexander said, and gestured, "If you would not pretend ignorance by wearing this body when it is not what you are. Presuming you do not upset the gods above by displaying yourself to me and no one else." 

A blink, and Washington was carved again. 

"Your carvings," he continued, gesturing, "You are not actually carved into a person. You do it to comfort me." 

“It is much more complicated than that, Colonel, but I do not have time for that explanation. More importantly, you are exhausted, and you should return to your room. I will tell the others not to disturb you." 

He could not even manage the strength to argue. Everything felt sore and he was the result of defective magic and the war was just an excuse for some alien to prove himself to his overlords. 

Washington took his silence for the forfeit that it was. "Would you like to walk there, or would you like me to take you there?" 

"You can do it," he said, and there was a flash of Elsewhere - the cave - and the sound of grinding rocks, and they were in his bedroom. 

“You do not appreciate it properly, but it is a great talent of humans and witches to sleep as you do.” 

"Of which I am neither, it seems," he said, though he did not even have the energy to add venom. He used the last reserves of strength to pull his feet, boots included, onto his bed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not for the first time, Alexander felt lucky that there was more work than could have been done by twice the number of aides they currently had.

Not for the first time, Alexander felt lucky that there was more work than could have been done by twice the number of aides they currently had. He took the work into himself like he could make it his soul. What he had as a soul or a spirit or something without the work was defective and broken - a cannon that had ripped apart, Washington had said. He was the resulting mess of steel that happened when you tried to ruin something that had been soldered together. Another way for him to be defective and rejected and like no one else. 

When he was not working, he thought of it. He was not like Pierre. He was not like Washington. There was no one like him, because he had been put together and then ripped apart and this was what was left. Maybe the stones would never actually be able to tell him what they meant - he should have never been able to hear them. Maybe he would never be able to light a candle, either. 

Work, he told himself. Read letters and write and ride your horse and pretend that Washington is flesh and Pierre is nothing but a cheery French boy and that he was not the result of some failed experiment. 

And yet, he could not unfeel the sense. He could not pretend himself out of knowing what Washington was and was not. Pierre, at least, hardly ever forced him to pretend he could not feel the strange consciousnesses he wished he did not possess. Pierre obviously thought you could pretend to not be whatever you were, even if you were deformed.

Tonight he laid awake and felt Washington doing magic outside. He had slept through plenty of mortaring and shouting, but this was different. It must have been important, if he was doing it in this realm and not the stone realm. Everyone else slept fitfully and Alexander could see the magic around them too. He was sure, if he tried, that he would have been able to feel Pierre awake as well. 

Perhaps Washington cast magic against Tory witches. That must have been it, really. Perhaps they would have been more doomed than ever, without Washington. Would the Tory witches have ruined everything before it had even started? Would they have crushed the fledgling army in New York? Had Washington convinced General Howe in some way to not pursue him through Brooklyn? 

Cursing the sky flashing colors and Washington and the British and himself, he got up, walked over the other sleeping aides, and headed outside. The quiet of the camp made him uneasy, and it was so dark he had to go back inside and get a lantern. Normally the campfire and voices of scouts guided him. Now everyone was asleep - held there, he bet, so Washington could do magic. It was unsettling in more ways than he cared to think about. 

 

Washington was still as stone and looked like the reflection on a river. He looked like moonlight on mirrors and reflections in puddles. Had Alexander not known better, he would have thought that someone had left this oddly-carved thing here for them to find and puzzle about. 

This was how Washington had been, on the first night. This was how he had found the man - not a man, he reminded himself - and at that time he had been lost in the memories and the sense of the island and the docks. He hardly noticed it now, somehow. It had only been what, days? Weeks? -- he was not sure what counted, when they were in Other places - and the sense seemed normal and fell into an easy place. It felt a little like he had already known, and forgotten, and a quick jog to his memory had settled him back into place. 

Even through the impossible strangeness of it, he could not deny the awe of seeing this river-stone glittering man, magic humming around him like heat off summer roads. 

He put on a face of casual indifference instead. That was best. That was safe. 

"Are you attacking the Tories?" he asked.

He heard a strange rumble in the ground that must have been a reply. His eyes dropped to the crushed grass, seeing nothing but his boots. He glanced around again and still saw no one. Then, feeling ridiculous, but less ridiculous than he thought he should have felt, he began to unlace them and pulled off his socks and felt the dry dirt in his toes. 

"Try again," he said, to Washington, who had not moved. 

The ground rumbled again, louder, and yet still indistinguishable. It was like the stones had cried to him for help when he had been Below. They begged him for help, he was sure, but there had been words, he had had not understood them. Washington did not ask for help - oh, it was almost laughable to imagine Washington asking for help - but Washington spoke through the ground. 

At least with Spanish or German he had a place to start deciphering the words in his head. He could identify and match roots. 

"You have to actually talk to me." It came out sharper than he had intended. 

There was another rumble in the ground, that he was certain was a reply. He opened his mouth to snap back, but then actual words met his ears. 

"Defending." 

It was not that Washington spoke, precisely. Oh, the words were in Washington's voice, which he was familiar with. And they were words in English, this time. It was only that the words seemed to come out of nowhere. Washington did not move from the glittering statue position he currently held. It was like Washington had some waiter or staff deliver him the words from some secret kitchen. They had no inflection or accent, even as much as Washington possessed these things on a normal day. They had been conjured from some paper. 

It was disconcerting at best, but it was an answer, and it was an answer he could understand. The unsettledness of it made him forget the slight of Washington speaking to him in a language that Washington must have known he did not understand. And then there as the subject of the words. Word. 

That was what to focus on. He gathered himself. "How do they attack us?" 

"They rewrite our correspondence and redraw our maps. Certainly they would send plague, but we have it enough." 

He could not resist the snort, as strange as the words sounded without the sarcastic inflection he knew was supposed to be there. No, out of all the things they lacked, plague was not one. 

HIs mind worked, maybe to distract him from the strangeness of it. What it would be like, if you could have the enemies' letters say anything that you wanted? He would never stop with such a power. He would have the letters say such ridiculous things. The key, of course, was to make everything just believable enough. As much as he would have liked to pretend the Howe brothers called each other pigs and swill, that would simply be dismissed. 

"Can we change their correspondence?" he asked. 

"I imagine that you could, but it would be challenging for me to do so without exposing myself." 

Another moment. It was easy to forget - maybe there was magic involved - that no one else know that Washington was this thing. When he was working, his brain simply skipped over all the facts that he knew, that this was all a game for a stone monster who was auditioning for his own kingship. How could something so absurd be so easy to forget?

Perhaps that it was so absurd made it so easy to forget. 

He considered. "Do you pretend to be a witch? Is that an acceptable thing to be doing magic on behalf of the army?" 

"My intent is to completely obscure what I am. I imagine that they no longer think me a witch, though, as I was spellcasting during the celestial re-alignment. A witch of my power would have known better. An error on my part." 

"So what do they think you are?" 

"It does not matter." 

"What if they learn what you are? Are there specific things that the Tories could do to attack you as a stone fae? Or do you just want to hide what you are because you're supposed to pretend you're human?" He took a step closer to Washington, though he could feel the intensity of the magic radiating off him. It was like walking too close to a bonfire. 

"There are many reasons." 

"Such as?" 

No response. Perhaps that meant _all of them_. Alexander scowled. 

“Please anchor yourself,” Washington said, instead. 

For a moment he was only puzzled. What did that mean? He felt the magic pull away. It reminded him of a wave, the strange suction of it, the expectation of -- 

A wave of power knocked the ground. His tailbone met a rock with a sharp stab of pain, and he cursed and picked himself up again, brushing off his pants. Washington was looking more like a person-thing now and less like a statue, studying him with his rock hands behind his back and a familiar Washington expression on his face. He no longer looked reflective and vibrant - just his regular stony self, black eyes and black skin and black clothes and black buttons and black boots and black hair. 

“Did you attack them?” 

“I reflected their energy back at them,” Washington said. Washington spoke this time, rather than handing him the words on a platter like a meal. “In my experience, witch magic can be unpredictable in many cases, such as when a stone fae collects it and throws it back at the casting witches.” 

“Are the Tory witches impressive?” 

“They do seem to try different effects when their spells fail, though I must say I have not met enough witches to say what makes witch magic impressive. They are better than the ones I knew in Ohio.” He paused. “The army will wake soon. We should talk inside.” Then he walked past Alexander and towards the headquarters building, leaving another stunned moment before he was followed. He began to speak again when he pushed the headquarters door open, something about him shimmering for a brief moment. “I never told you why I suspected you had attacked me,” Washington said, “We spoke of your Wreck, and it seemed to envelope you, and you needed to rest. And you did not seem to wish to discuss the matter; I felt that you wanted to work. You prefer your old life.”

 

It must have been the magic - hunters, his old reality, how the world has been - but something made all the questions easy to forget. 

“No,” Alexander said. He simply could not keep all the questions in his head, it seemed. He could only ask so many questions about this ridiculous thing that was his life that he had to forget one. “I suppose you never did. How could it matter? Can you not simply see that I am an utter disaster?” A bitter smile wormed onto his mouth. 

“No, and that is even more interesting,” Washington said, “It seems that you are not only Wrecked, but someone took great care to disguise the layers of magic that are part of that Wreck, and disguised even the edges of it. If you are Wrecked, then some force or faction somewhere went through an enormous effort to hide it from you and anyone who might wish to assist you.” 

“They want me to look human, so that no magic things want to help me out?” he asked, more of a confirmation. 

“I believe so. That leads us to the critical question: why?” Washington said, and sat down at his desk. The detail of his figure came into sharper relief; he looked more specifically carved into human form than ever, down the wrinkles in his brow and the wornness of his hands. He lit a candle at the desk, though even before he did so the darkness felt less oppressive. Then it had felt more like a curtain of night, thick all over, and this was more like a tender fog, really, and lightening at every moment. In the hallway, Alexander had heard sleepy grumbles and half-awake mutters where there had been silence; there was the sound of feathers shifting as men rolled in their beds and the complaints of men waking. 

“I don’t even know when it happened,” Alexander said, a frustrated frown coming over his mouth, “What did I do to bring down this punishment? Of course I have always tried to be notable, and certainly been punished in ways, but all those things were all human things, and the punishments were all human punishments.”

“Whatever it was, your enemies went through great effort to make sure you remained ignorant. That tells me they found you a very significant threat indeed.” 

He let out an irritated growl of frustration. Every moment was just another way the world sought to stymie him. “Why didn’t they just kill me?” 

“Another question that that remains curiously unanswered.” There was a pause. Washington sat down at his desk and reached for the stack of paper on one side. It was strange, for those stone fingers to handle the delicate paper so lightly. His stone eyes seemed to flicker from the beginning to the end of the missive, and then he looked back up Alexander, “I felt the hunters remove you from this plane. I don’t know where you went, but I knew you were gone. Your aura disappeared. I expected an attack.” 

Alexander snorted back a laugh. “Yes,” he said, folding his arms behind his back, “I disappeared to attack you. I have been so capable with my magic, and you are not at all important to the cause I support, for your own means or otherwise.” 

“It was ridiculous,” Washington said, “But if you were capable of disappearing so completely, you obviously wer more capable than you seemed. Given that I know very little of your magic, Wreck or no Wreck --there is no downside to me being cautious.” 

“Other than scaring the piss out of me, I suppose.” 

Washington scowled. Hamilton shrugged off the oncoming comment about his language. 

He tried not to be rattled about the feeling of being stolen by something so impossibly huge. Given how that thing had felt - the claw, the vibrating air, the way every inch of the universe had threatened him, the way it seemed he had looked into an eye that was the side of the ocean --- he could believe it. 

Instead he let his hands fall to his side and paced in the office, watching the floorboards flicker in the low candlelight and the barest beginnings of dawn. He should have been tired, but being around Washington doing magic only rejuvenated him. “If only you could do some autopsy of my Wreck. We could both know more. Can such a thing even be done?” 

Washington put the piece of paper down that he was reading. He stroked his chin with his hand, seeming much more human in this setting. “It is not a talent of the fae, to do so,” he said, “But there are others who are more capable.” 

“Like du Ponceau?” His heart skipped a beat. Yes, Pierre had said that he did not want to be involved. But if Pierre could tell him what he was, why he was like this, who thought he was something so threatening -- 

He was grateful that he had known Washington for so long, and was familiar with the minor quirks of the general, which he’d kept even though it turned out he was an ancient stone being from another land. He was also grateful that Washington seemed so human at that very moment, down to the tiny little creases of his mouth. Otherwise, Alexander would not have see the flick of his lip that would not have represented a smile on any other being. 

“Others,” Washington said, and went back to the next piece of paper. 

He could feel Pierre, and the man could not never speak to him again, or something so ridiculous. What could Pierre do to him that was worse than what had already been done? He was a defective, exploded cannon at this point. Surely the boy who had quit magic and run away could not punish him any further. So he offered the bare hints of a salute and turned around. 

“Colonel,” Washington said, sharp. 

Alexander stopped and turned. 

“Perhaps you should put your boots back on, if you are to be around the general camp.” 

He looked down at his dirty feet. Strange, that you could forget something so ridiculous. Somehow it did not feel so bad, to have the grass in your toes and the dirt on your heels. The dirt was almost stone, maybe. “A good idea, sir,” he said, and went to retrieve the boots and shoes, left behind headquarters where it looked like nothing strange had ever happened

*** 

 

Pierre must have known he was coming, for the boy was standing outside the house where he was boarded and looking very sour indeed. Not even Pierre’s boyish face or the soft predawn light of the sun softened his scowl much. 

“I am not going to be hunted-- ” he started, but Alexander had many talents despite his evergrowing list of defects, and one was to talk over anyone who wanted to shut him down. 

“Washington thinks the reason I am the way that I am is when I was a child, someone cast a very powerful spell on me, and somehow the celestial alignment made it defective and now I am a Wreck,” he said, loud and fast, because he knew Pierre would hide it to hide himself, “And he said that some people might be better at looking at the Wreck and identifying where and how it came from, and why, and who.” 

Pierre stared at him for a few moments. “Why would he think you are Wrecked?” 

A pause. 

“You didn’t ask?” At the continued silence, Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “It is insane enough that you have encountered a hunter and survived it, and more or less as you always have been,” he said, folding his arms over his chest and shaking his head. “And also that a stone fae suddenly is positing you are Wrecked. And despite all your questioning, you did not ask how he could come to that conclusion?” 

“I will ask him later,” Alexander said, finally regaining his footing. It was completely likely that in th ten thousand questions that existed, he would miss the perfect one, and yet somehow it felt so obvious with Pierre bringing it up. Nonetheless, it was a question he could ask at any time; Washington always seemed amenable enough to him. He wasn’t here for that. “Anyway, what we are going to do is we are going autopsy my Wreck. Presuming, of course, you do not need to kill me to do it.” 

Pierre stared at him for a couple of moments and muttered something under his breath in French, too quick for Alexander to hear. “No, monsieur, we are not going to do that,” he said, “You can do whatever you want with your ---” a gesture at him, in general -- “With this. With your magic. With General Washington. But I said before and I will say again, and as many times as you need to hear it, which I am well aware can be a lot of times --- I am not getting involved with this and with you and with the fae. For all I know some hunter is going to disappear me for talking to you about it.” 

“Pierre, see reason about this!” Alexander reached out, but Pierre snapped back, closer to the door. 

“Reason, Ham?” Pierre said, his voice rising, “There is nothing reasonable to be seen about it. If it was only the simple matter of now you have suddenly become a witch, there are ways I would be able to accommodate that. If it was only a matter of trying to do something so that you would not accidentally summon a hunter and disappear yourself from existence, that would a circumstance I could perhaps assist with, in some small way. But that is not the case!” Alexander felt the magic in his sense now, that Pierre could essentially be shouting at him and the beginnings of waking soldiers did not even think to notice them. “So I plead with you, sir, to dismiss me from your halfcocked ideas and plans. I am sorry that things are so strange and your circumstance is so unique. The danger of the war is one thing. This --” He gestured, again, “--only a fool would get involved, and any sensible being of any magic at all would give you that answer.” 

“That things are strange means you are required more than ever, with your wisdom--” 

“ _Alexander_ ,” Pierre said, and it must have been the magic behind the his name that made him stop, “I am here to assist the Baron in his effort for the war. I am not providing any sort of magical force at all to this cause, and I am not beginning now. I am especially not going to be some damn otygaruth for your mystery wounds! Do not ask me again, or you will find yourself struggling to talk about it with anyone, including your precious fae!” 

Pierre did something in the air with his hands and Alexander felt what must have been magic being done. The next moment later, a courier appeared next to him. 

“Have a good day, Colonel,” Pierre said, wearing a familiar smile, “Certainly we will have more pleasant things to discuss next. I think you should follow up with the general on the matter, if you need be.” 

The man next to him was waiting to be acknowledged. Pierre no longer hid them. Bastard, Alexander thought, and forced a smile back at him. “You can be sure that I will,” he said, trying to keep the hiss from his voice, and then with a deep inhale he turned to the messenger. “What?” 

The courier blinked at him for a moment and took a step back. “Is everything alright, Colonel?” he asked, eyes flicking to the door Pierre had disappeared behind and back to him. 

“A mysterious question with too many answers for one morning, I think,” Alexander said. He turned from the door and began to walk back to headquarters, the messenger in tow. “Enough about me. Go on with your business.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knew the general's calendar. If he could only remember his defects, and the stone cries for help, and that Pierre had said _I'm not some damn otygaruth!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys! i'd like some insight from the few readers of this story. it's clearly not a popular one, and since updating it is annoying and inconsistent, i'm thinking about deleting it from ao3 just giving the 4 of you access to the google doc instead. if there are a lot of you that are reading and aren't commenting, let me know. give me your feedback in the comments - i'll respond!

First there had been quartermaster reports, and things about Lafayette’s battalion returning, and more about their successful efforts north of them, and complaints about the French, and arguments about what to do with the army next, and of course everyone wanted food and boots and horses and bullets -- 

Washington did not stay stone when he was doing his general duties, Alexander noted. He was angry about it at first, and forgot a little afterwards. This was the domain of Washington in the flesh, and their conversations belonged to Washington in stone. 

\-- It must have been magic that made it all easy to fall into. Magic that he forgot about everything impossible when the war went. Did the hunters make it so one war thought lead to another and all those thoughts painted over his questions? Was it from his Wreck? Was Washington like this, forgetting about his bigger picture? 

 

Only after he’d had Washington alone to discuss moving forward - Washington wished to strike New York when the Comte de Rochambeau thought they should move south and take Virginia and the Carolinas - did he realize they had spend several hours talking about the war and Alexander had not at all asked about what Pierre had said. 

It was easy to get distracted by the war, with Lafayette just returning and now there was talk already about sending him southward. They'd had a hell of a celebration a few nights ago - no.one could get drunk and ridiculous and keep drinking like Lafayette. Alexander could drink and be ridiculous, but Lafayette - diminutive as he was - could drink him and John and the rest of them under the table. 

Why did stone Washington like Lafayette so much? A strange thing to be part of an act. There must have been a reason, but what? What secret did Lafayette hide that made him valuable to Washington's greater effort? 

Just another question on top of all the others. Easy to forget them Washington said they should attack New York and all the Frenchmen said they should go South. Mostly his evenings were filled with that argument, and to watch Washington made it hard to remember that his investment in the cause was for only his own means. 

If the Comte de Rochambeau knew….

He knew the general's calendar. If he could only remember his defects, and the stone cries for help, and that Pierre had said _I'm not some damn otygaruth!_ and the way nothing made sense and how frustrating everything was, and how terrible it seems like everything was just one impossible thing after another -- 

Ah, there it was the anger that powered this strange quest. He stepped into the general's office. Washington and Tallmadge were talking in low voices, but Washington was angry. Tallmadge, Alexander thought, would handle the news about his heroic and noble general quite poorly. 

When he appeared both of them looked at him, and Tallmadge scowled. “Maybe he can give you the blind advice you want, Your Excellency,” the spymaster said, colder than normal, “Or maybe you will permit his arguments more reasonably than mine. But even if New York is my home, I cannot see the wisdom of it.” 

So Tallmadge wanted them to go south as well. That was interesting. He would have thought otherwise, with the spy ring and knowing Tallmadge was a New York boy, even more than him - on one of those little farms somewhere. The man would have had a good reason to leave his family behind. He made a note to ask about it, which he imagined he would actually remember more promptly.

“You have your orders, Major,” Washington replied, curt. “If you will excuse us.” 

Tallmadge tilted his head in a fraction of a bow. He did not quite storm out, but it was close. 

“Even the Major thinks we should go south?” Alexander asked. 

Washington offered a harrumph in response. “What is it, Colonel?” 

“I have some questions I would like to answer,” he said, and wiggled his sense, in some way. 

Immediately the scowl faded from Washington’s face and something about him became dark. The flesh flickered, as if he was projected upon a screen, and then it was gone. It was a good an answer as any. 

“I have only a moment of these matters, but if you can be quick, I can see if I can indulge.” A beat. “It has been some time, since it has been a matter?” 

“The war is busy,” Alexander responded, and even in the stone he could see the little smile at the corner of Washington’s mouth. “Something about all this makes it easy to forget. Is it of your doing, or of the hunters, or of the world?” 

“A longer question than the moment has time for,” Washington replied. He sat back down at his desk, calm appearing where there had once been frustration, “But in essence, we are in a human circumstance, on a human plane, acting in a human way, and so there is a tendency of the energy of human actions and human thoughts to suppress other types, if you do not mitigate it.” 

“Do you forget, sometimes, what you are?” 

Washington paused. He glanced at his busy desk and the office and out the window to the tents. “‘Forget’ is a bit strong. The aura does affect me. Is that what you wanted to discuss? I am supposed to discuss matters with the French delegate very soon. I would have you concentrate on that instead.” 

Focus, Alexander. So it was not just him. If Washington was affected by it… 

“What is an otygaruth?” he asked. 

The question was clearly unexpected. Washington blinked at him, once or twice, and then folded his arms on the desk and studied him in another moment of silence. “Otygaruths are carrion creatures. I would expect you to be more distraught if you had come across one.”

The answer was as unexpected as the question. “I was talking to Mr. du Ponceau if he could help learn about my Wreck. He was distressed about it. He told me that he was not some ‘damn otygaruth.’” 

“Did he?” Washington echoed, “What a fascinating leap; I had not considered it. When an otygaruth eats it's scavenge meal, they know the history of it. Perhaps Mr. du Ponceau thought your Wreck similar. There have been stories of otygaruth in magical court to track the path of some item. Although I am not an expert to say if such a thing can be done with a spell. I have never needed it. Perhaps it would work for you.”

Alexander was too revolved and stunned to reply. He thought he ought to stop thinking things could be impossible. 

“Would it…” It was a struggle to leap from one thought to another. Carrion creatures. Tracking items. Scavenging. “Does it have to eat me to know?” 

“I will ask one I know, if that is a step you would like to pursue.” 

Even with these limited details, it was a horrifying option. And yet, if it was used in magical courts, and if Washington could just ask -- 

“Yes, if it is not an inconvenience.” 

“I will let you know, when I know more.” Washington looked like he had something else to add on the matter, but there was a knock on the door behind the that startled Alexander. When he looked back, Washington was flesh again, and he was standing. “Should I have Colonel Laurens translate instead?” 

“No, I will do it.” Strange, that he should be relieved to forget. It was not only impossible now - it was horrifying, that some carrion worm could eat the vestiges of his magic and maybe the rest of him to and know something. He was plenty familiar with maggots. This was more than that. 

“Good,” Washington said, and stood, “Come, then. Help me convince the Comte that New York is the obvious choice for our next step.” 

“Yes, sir,” he said, even if he was not sure he agreed.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I spoke to an otygaruth. It is happy to touch your Wreck. It told me the experience would be multiple levels of unpleasant for you, and you should only pursue this action if you are extraordinarily driven.”

The following evening, Washington awoke him with a rumble that felt like an avalanche. He could not quite explain the shock; it was as if silverware had fallen off some kitchen shelf with a rattle, and caused him to shake. Nonetheless, he was awake, in the dark night, and John and everyone else was still asleep. He was still tired from the previous day’s effort; there had been a lot of arguing he had to follow, and plans, and translating. Washington still did not want to south, and Rochambeau still did not want to go to New York. Alexander thought they would have to decide one way or another, and quickly at that; campaigning season was arriving with haste. It seemed incomprehensible, that anyone would argue with this stone monster from beyond. How could he not be right? How could he not know the correct course of action? He was ancient, and had some other experience other than their measly mortal lives. 

Whatever Washington did stopped the others from waking when he did. He felt more confident, now, about lighting a candle and getting dressed and going outside. Alexander crossed the doorway and agreed, in his thoughts and without any discussion, was where these witch-and-stone matters. Inside was for the war. He could sense Washington now, if he tried. Washington felt like snow-capped peaks, like the ones he’d seen on clear days outside New York. 

He walked further outside the camp this time, all the way down to the little stream where hr had stuck his bare feet and tried to understand or go Below. Neither of which, he thought to himself, he had managed. The war did something that made him forget those things. 

Washington was standing in the stream, the water running over his stone ankles. “I spoke to an otygaruth. It is happy to touch your Wreck. It told me the experience would be multiple levels of unpleasant for you, and you should only pursue this action if you are extraordinarily driven.” 

It was nice, at least, to get a direct answer about something. He didn’t have to fight with Washington to actually tell him the answer. He looked at Washington’s stone boot feet, and then sat in the dry grass to begin unlacing his boots. 

“Extraordinarily unpleasant?” He echoed, pulling his first boot off, “Painful? Or?” 

“It did not elaborate,” Washington watched him pull off his other boot and then put his feet in the water. “But my understanding of their skill is the knowledge comes from taste.” Alexander blinked, once and twice, looking up at him. 

“The otygaruth is going to _eat_ my Wreck? Am I going to be damaged?” The water was cool on his feet, and the stones on the bottom of the creek felt smooth and comfortable. They mumbled to him, if he concentrated, but they still spoke words he did not understand. 

“It was not made clear to me,” Washington said. His eyes flickered to Alexander’s bare toes under the clear stream, then up at him, “But such a thing is possible. I stressed that you needed to be able to participate in my effort, and it was confident you could do so.” 

_Unpleasant._ Sure, that sounded bad. But worse, he thought, would be wondering about all the different ways he was excluded from groups. Worse would be knowing that he could never fit into any bunch. Worse would be never understanding why he was like this, or who had attacked him, or what they had intended. That was worse than unpleasant, and if that was all this was… 

“I still want to,” Alexander said, without missing another beat, “It can hardly be worse than any other unpleasantness.” 

“I would be wary of using that as your condition,” Washington said. 

Alexander shrugged. “Wariness noted, Your Excellency."

For a moment Washington looked like he was going to argue. Alexander waited for something, but nothing came. 

“What does an otygaruth look like?” he asked. 

“They are large carrion worms,” Washington said, “Like a maggot the size of a man, with a pair of claws, and a pair of hands, and many feet.” 

There was no denying that it was a repulsive description. Alexander tried to a maggot bigger than his fingernail - a giant, wiggling thing, rubbery and wiggling. Large enough to look at him? Large enough to - taste his magic? His stomach did a little loop, and then he took a deep breath of night air. “Are they common? How did Mr. du Ponceau think of such a thing to say?” 

Washington thought for a moment. He opened his mouth once, and then closed it, still contemplating. Alexander braced himself for something suitably impossible, disgusting, or both. 

“Given their taste for carrion,” Washington said, “It is quite common for one or two of them to claim some war or battlefield their territory. Perhaps he has seen one. Or perhaps it is a saying, among witches. I cannot be sure."

Alexander thought about that, and then immediately wished he hadn’t. “Like vultures.” 

Washington nodded. Alexander had a unpleasant mental image of some massive worm at Brandywine or Trenton, after listening to the moans of men who had not been recovered, and seen the corpses of the splattered dead -- 

\-- that mouth on his magic. 

He must have made a face, because Washington quirked an eyebrow at him.

“Do you want me to alert you, when it is ready?” 

“Yes, sir.” For now the less he thought about it, the better. So. New topic. “Do you think the Comte would argue less if he knew you were a stone monster?” 

“He is very assured of himself,” Washington said, “He would fight to go south if I proclaimed myself god.”

***

When he woke up he was Below. John, the other aides, the dull room with it’s lovely window, the desks, the whiskey Tench had acquired from somewhere and jealously hoarded, the notes, and the wood walls were all gone. 

He could not say when it was, or if there was time at all, or if time passed. He could have been just below the war effort or on some far continent. Either way it was intensely disorienting to snap awake, and even the bedframe and the dull mattress was more comfortable than the stone that was under him now. He was dressed and armed too. 

Below was again a dark cavern lit by an unknown source, with the sounds of water in the far, far distance. Only this time, when he looked up he saw holes in one wall. They were honeycomb or termite-like, he thought, distracted from one surprise to another. He walked closer to the holes and saw that they were not small, not by any means - he could have easily crawled through one, though he imagined Washington might have some trouble. As he got closer he also noticed they were smooth around the edges - as if some machine had cut them out of the structure. Even more interesting, they were not just holes but passages - maybe massive, linking tunnels. In the strange impossible light of the cavern, he could look inside them and see them twist and turn away after some time. 

He would have thought a place made for and about stone would be impenetrable to such boring, but one learned new things every day, and maybe it meant something else different. Only after did he feel resolved enough about the holes did he notice Washington’s sense, like mountains in the background of dramatic portraits. When he turned from the wall, Washington was standing there, grey facets visible in the light, still as a statue. 

“Why am I here?” 

“To see your Wreck,” Washington said. 

Oh. He had not quite forgotten, but he knew the world did have some effect on him and his thoughts. It was not quite that he had put the matter to rest, but Washington had said he would return when he knew more, and the argument about New York and South Carolina, which stretched an impossible eternity, had taken up forefront in his mind. 

Alexander looked around for the thing Washington had described. He saw no horrific worms and shot Washington a puzzled look. 

Washington’s stone irises flickered to the wall Alexander had been investigating. Alexander looked at it and waited for something to happen. 

If he concentrated he could feel something just at the edge of his sense. He took a step nearer to the wall and felt the something come closer. What was it? He reached out, as if to get a feel --

\-- he flinched back at the snap of teeth. Many teeth, gashing like fortification spades. There was not only teeth there, but will - hunger not like the gnawing ache of army pains, but hunger like drive, hunger like focus, hunger like _consume_. 

Then with the sense came a rhythmic pattern. The pattern had many beats and seemed irregular and still it came closer. It became a busy clatter that sounded like army feet. 

Alexander took a step back and from one of the holes emerged a massive larval thing. The thing - monster would have been generous - was a maggot longer than Alexander was tall and perhaps just barely thick enough to wrap his arms about, had Alexander ever wanted to touch something horrific. Carrion worm, as Washington had called it, seemed generous to worms. The thing had a mouth that was many mouths, different teeth in layers, the whole thing only somewhat closed. Instead of eyes the thing had many black snouts that could have been ears or noses misplaced. 

Alexander staggered back onto his ass. His hands felt firm stone, and he used it to inch away from the thing as it crawled, millipede-like, down the wall and across the stone floor to him. 

It was one thing to be afraid in the face of war and death and hunger. It was another for some bulbous, abysmal monstrosity he could not have imagined in his worst nightmare to walk - “walk” - towards him. 

It stopped a little distance from him and did not move again. Then only a good five or ten moments later did he feel the rumble. It was in his ears. The language. 

“Is it trying to talk to me?” He wondered aloud.

“Yes,” Washington said. Alexander startled again; he had forgotten Washington was there. The word grounded him. 

Oh god. 

_He had said this thing would eat his magic._

For several solid moments he considered giving up the quest entirely. It could not be worth it, to be any closer to that abomination. Even this distance had made him suspect it had all been a mistake. He would be defective in happy ignorance. He would go back to whenever it had been he had agreed to this and change his mind. He would heed Washington’s warning. 

“It would like to know if you are no longer interested in the procedure.” 

Washington - and this thing, the otygaruth - were giving him the opportunity to back out. 

He clamped down on the fear and took a step towards the otygaruth. 

“I am still interested,” Alexander said, and pretended there was no tremble in his voice. Oh, he had faced death in a thousand ways. But this, even if this thing was concerned for him --

\-- no bayonet would ever scare him again. 

Then the otygaruth reared up and Alexander thought that he might change his mind. The thing was about his eye height. The head - thought there was no neck, really - was just a mouth of mouths in mouths and black holes like pits. Some of the feet on what was now the thing’s stomach curled closer in and from the pale, blob flesh emerged appendages that Alexander had failed to notice. The first set were larger - scythe-like, and it used then to hold it's torso up. There was a second set, hands. Strange hands, with five fingers and a thumb on each side. The whole thing other then the hands gleamed faintly, like it was covered in sweat or slime. 

He heard Washington rumble to it and it rumbled back.

“What is it?” Alexander demanded. 

“It is impressed with your fortitude,” Washington said, and Alexander huffed a laugh. 

The otygaruth came closer. Alexander pretended his feet were weights. Now there was not only the audience of millipede feet but the clink of the scythe appendages, like a a man who needed two canes to walk. 

The smell hit him last. It smelled like an August battlefield two days after the battle. It smelled worse than any latrine or graveyard. It smelled like worse than the docks. It smelled like someone had left the medical tent uncovered for a few summer days and the used the ground to store horse corpses and raw beef. 

It was the smell that forced him to his knees, not the appearances. He was glad that, whenever it was, he had not recently eaten, and even then the dry heaves came. 

They passed but the smell remained, and the horrifying thing too, a few steps away. Alexander wiped the spittle from his mouth and took a few deep breaths to try and settle his stomach. The thought that this thing would come closer -- that in some parts of him might touch him - he had to suppress the new round of heaves. 

He forced himself to stand again and take in this monstrosity. Then he stepped towards it and offered a hand, even though every sense in his brain told him otherwise. The otygaruth reached out one of the more hand-like like hands and shook it. The hand was covered in tiny bristles, like some drawing of a large spider John had showed him. It was the least unpleasant part so far. 

“Okay,” he said, and took a deep breath through his mouth, to get as little of the cloying rot as possible. 

It rumbled. 

“It suggested to close your eyes,” Washington said, and Alexander did. 

There was a tongue in his sense, and he almost flicked back, but the otygaruth's grip held him. Had he ever been licked before? Never like this, and never in some limb that he couldn't see. It was disgusting and the instinct to run was finally overwhelming,but the grip held him. 

It was as worm-like as everything else, and then the tongue touched something in him that felt like a new bruise and the agony subsumed the revulsion. He may have screamed; the tongue did something to him that reminded him of when when the stones had been all around him only worse. The tongue pressed against his sense-bruise, probing. He wrestled back, and then another arm took him, and then the world stopped.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The feeling of being prodded directly in his magical bruise stopped abruptly. Alexander took a breath of relief and smelled sea air and cooking spices. He opened his eyes.

The feeling of being prodded directly in his magical bruise stopped abruptly. Alexander took a breath of relief and smelled sea air and cooking spices. He opened his eyes.

They were on his home in St Croix. His real home, not the ones he'd been shuffled to and from. The home with his mother and his books - one of the better parts of his life.

Only it was obviously not actually his home. Not only, of course, did the place display no destruction like Alexander knew it had been wrecked, but there was an ethereal glow to it, and instead of things being the colors they should have been, it was all the blue of sunlight reflecting off water, and where it was not blue it was oddly translucent, like looking at his home through a fogged window. Some things were more solid than others - there was a temptation to touch the books in the top shelf because they looked so solid, whereas the furniture was nearly imperceptible. The collection of solid blue things other than books included the door, the utensils on the nearly-invisible table, and his mother's old broom. 

Then he noticed it, as he took in the scene.

There was a woman on the ground surrounded by pools of blue, spilled like blood. Like the rest of the scene, she still, but her stillness was different - more intense. She had been wounded; there was a weakness that didn’t only come through only the spilled blue blood, but also her form ,which seemed as if it was about to dissolve away. Alexander knelt, his brain saying _impossible_ and all the same while going _It could only be one._. What other women could have lain prone on his kitchen floor? 

No. It was his mother. 

“Mother!” he shouted, falling to her side and grabbing for her. His hand went right not only through her shoulder, but through the floor as well. The whole scene was as solid as mist, even so he knelt there. Worse, she did not react. She was a statue, or maybe it was all a painting, or ---

“This is the otygaruth reading your Wreck.” Alexander startled. Washington was standing behind him, as calm as ever. “When magic is cast, it often takes energy from the world around it. Like beer brewed, magic can be traced to where and when it was done if you are skilled at reading those traces.”

Alexander stared at the glittering scene. His unremembered past. It looked like it had been drawn with the reflection on the ocean, on a cloudless sky. It was motionless. 

“Were you on St Croix with me?” 

he asked, unwilling to look away from his mother's form.

“No," Washington said, "I, like you, am a mere observer to this portrayal of events." 

A bitter laugh escaped him. He spent years hiding all of this, at least with some success, and in the end Washington was literally standing inside some magical rendition of all if it. 

A dull dread began to thud in time with his hearbeat. If it was his memory, there was something missing, wasn't there? Certainly his life included his sick mother - attacked, he wondered, based on the magic-blood - and this house. He turned towards the wall, wondering if it could be worse. In the corner, barely there, were a pile of toys he considered himself too mature to play with. Here were some old wells of ink that were kept long after they held any decent amount of ink. The ink was as blue as an ocean inside the well, and seemed as if it was going to burst out the nearly-invisible glass. Where was it? 

“Why are some things more blue than others?” he asked Washington. He was grateful that, however this magic worked, the otygaruth was not here to desecrate this place that he loved. You thought you put your life behind you, and you never really did. You could become a witch and learn your general was a fae and realize you were defective in an infinite number of ways and still his chest ached. 

“While I am no expert, I would guess that things that are very blue have a great deal of magic in them, and things that are less blue have only trace amounts.” 

Alexander frowned. His went back to the prone body on the ground. Clearly the most blue was the puddles around her, and he felt a little zip in his hand when he put a finger to one. 

“My mother was a witch,” he said. 

“Based on this scene alone, I would say there is no other reasonable conclusion.” 

“So then I was a witch before… the… alignment?” 

“Not unlikely.” 

It didn’t make any sense. 

He turned from the wall and saw, if he waited for the blue to coalesce, strangers in his home. The first was a human Alexander did not recognize - an adult around his current age from and of obvious means, based on the intricate blue embroidery in his clothes. The man was angry and astonished; his teeth were bared in a snarl, his arms were raised, and his eyes were wide with shock. The most blueness was most intense in the tips of his fingers and the center of his chest. The other figure was --- the other figure looked like a piece of poorly hewn stone, with only a vague semblance of arms and legs and a head, chunky fingers but no other significant toes or eyes or clothes to speak of.

Alexander turned to look at Washington, his dread momentarily set aside, and Washington ---

Washington was staring at the human with a look of impossible disbelief. Alexander could count on his hands the amount of times he’d seen Washington looked so stunned, and now in his stone form it was even more uncharacteristic. 

“Dinwiddie,” Washington hissed, with low rage usually reserved for his most loathed enemies. “My pest.”

“These people are familiar to you?” Alexander said. 

“The witch I know,” Washington said, “The fae is unfamiliar, though one of my kind. That might explain why I never sensed the spell on you, and why the Wreck has caused you to be stone affiliated. If they cooperated, they could design the spells around you to be muted to stone senses.” 

At least that was once question answered. The dread returned, and Alexander noted the witch, Dinwddie, and the stone fae, both looking in the same direction - not at his mother. Alexander’s eyes followed their gazes. There, in the corner…

An impossibly light silhouette of a boy sprawled on the ground. He could barely see the boy - him, of course, had to be, with that narrow face and the small body, underfed, that reminded him with a pang of the old hunger. He had to stare to keep his body in sight. A longer glance and a glimmer of magic, like a far-off star, became visible in his chest. Other than that, there was so little blue in him that he was not completely sure it was there at all. 

What made it harder to examine him was that there was something strange about the space around his unconscious little form. He took a step forward and reached out into and felt - nothing. Not nothing like air and space, but somehow there was a void. There was no air in that spot, no magic and no memory. Some bit of it had been clipped up, like a pattern cut from a book. 

Washington stepped next to him and reached out with a hand to touch the space, deep thoughts worn into his brow. His stone fingers brushed up against the nothingness, and then he glanced at the hand in question, as if it would tell him. 

“I certainly am the center of attention,” Alexander said. 

Washington let out a noise that sound like grinding that could only have been a laugh. “The ways you are able to do just that, to greater and greater heights, is nothing short of extraordinary.”

“Thank you,” Alexander said, automatically. He turned back to the scene, trying to process it all without being overwhelmed “They - they made my mother sick, so much that she died? And they -- what, suppressed my magic?”

So had it not just been a fever that had killed her and left him to his fate. The thought of it was --- he did not even know, what to do with the thought of it. She had not only died. She had been murdered. She had been murdered and him kept secret from it, and then they had sapped him of the magic just as well. There was no other real conclusion, to the scene, to all his questions. He clenched his fists and the rage swelled. “Why? What did your people want with me?” 

“I d not know,” Washington said, very slow. Alexander knew what it sounded like when the general had been given the pieces of a puzzle and was trying to put them together, “But it is a question I would greatly interested in the answer to.”

An impossible breeze ruffled his ears. He looked up and saw the ceiling of the house beginning to fade away into some impossible void, like the very world was dissolving. The fade melted into the beams that supported the house, and then the fae and the witch, and the table and the illusory him and his felled mother and the puddles of her magic-blood. Then him and Washington were in and surrounded by nothing, and something like the hooked cane reached around his entire body and yanked him back into oblivion.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was laying on the floor and everything hurt, and the otygaruth was gone (though he could smell it), and Washington was standing there, looking off into the middle distance, eerily still.

He was laying on the floor and everything hurt, and the otygaruth was gone (though he could smell it), and Washington was standing there, looking off into the middle distance, eerily still.

You would think you could get used to getting more questions than answers every time you tried to figure something out. You’d be wrong.

“Why didn’t they just kill me?” he asked the stone sky and hazy half-light. That was the one that baffled him the most. He could acknowledge that he had been a witch and his mother had been a witch. They had always been a strange and disliked family - maybe that was why his father had left. But if enemies sought to ruin them, why was he still alive? Why was he allowed to continue, albeit without magic but with all of his wits? He had come so far. Did the witch, Dinwiddie, and his stone ally think it was enough to suppress his magic? Did they ever look at his accomplishments and consider returning to finish him off? Did they think the war would do it for them? 

In the vision his enemies were stunned. Did he fight them off in some way, and perhaps the suppression of his magic was the best possible outcome? Was something about him or the magic a surprise to them? Was there some ally of his, unknown and unseen, that had come to his aid as best as possible?

“Do you think they intended to kill me?” He asked the back of Washington, finally summoning enough energy to sit up. “And if so, why did they not do so?”

“It is not the nature of stone to toy with their enemies; we are a sure kind. Had you been my enemy, I would have made sure you were very thoroughly disposed of, if I thought it was serious enough to reveal myself completely to a witch.” Washington turned to face him, and he stood, suppressing the groan from all of his aches. “There is also the strange void around you to consider. Did it save you, in some way? Or was it only their intention to suppress your magic, and the void was a involved? Though I have no evidence on this theory, I suspect that it protected you. Perhaps some unconscious defense by yourself or your mother, or some unknown ally, or magical shield - given the extraordinary circumstances, no option is truly more or less likely than other.” 

“Do you think that they -- that the magic might have caused my mother to…..”A hard lump formed in his throat, and he pushed his palms into his closed eyes, feeling the pains intensify, “become very ill?” Alexander asked. 

“She was badly damaged in your vision,” Washington said, “For stone fae, magical wounds can have physical or mental elements. If it works the same for witches, than it is very possible, yes.”

“She died of a fever,” Alexander said, more to convince himself. To think that it had not only been a fever, which had been horrible enough, but that she had been hurt - killed - by people. Not even people. A stone being and a witch. 

Washington tilted his head and was polite enough not to vocalize his obvious disbelief. 

“We should return to the army,” Alexander said, because the thought was --- that his mother had been - that these monsters had, then then forced him to forget -- 

“Yes,” Washington said, and then they were in the general’s office and Washington was blue and beige and human again. Outside the office people sounded baffled and confused and daylight was streaming through the windows. 

Alexander swallowed around the lump still lodged in his throat. He glanced to the closed door, and then to the window with its closed blinds, and then back to Washington. 

“You should say we were in the middle of something important and I send my sincerest apologies for delaying everyone else,” Washington said, because he did not have his world being turned upside down every day and things needed to be normal. “And you should rest, so that you recover from this.”

“The last thing I need now is rest, sir,” Alexander said. How to explain that the last thing he wanted was to be given another moment alone to wonder how it seemed that every time he went digging, he found some even more baffling piece of the puzzle? It was not only that he had to be a witch that another witch scorned and that he had these magical scars that made him no true fit for any world, but now it was because he had been attacked and his mother killed and him made to forget all of it? “I want to win this war, so I can find the man who killed my mother, and the fae too, if I can.”

“When I am sovereign, they will both be suitably punished,” Washington said, clenching a fist, “But I can sense that your head is not in _this_ war, where I need it to be. Your aura is the island again, and you are in that house. We have too many enemies for you to be distracted. If you cannot set it aside, you will not be effective.” 

He couldn’t help it. “I apologize,” he snapped, “I do not mean to be distracted after learning that my mother was murdered and I was magically compelled to forget that both she and I were witches.”

Washington frowned at him, but instead of a retort he simply got up, walked past him, and opened the door. Rochambeau and his aides, and Von Steuben, Pierre at his side, and Greene and Knox were all standing there, talking to each other in a mix of English and French. When the door opened, the generals all looked at Washington with a mix of anger and confusion; Alexander didn’t miss the glance Pierre shot at him, baffled, before pretending to ignore him. 

“I beg your infinite apologies, gentlemen,” Washington said, hiding Alexander with his body as all the men straightened, “The colonel and I had a matter of deep importance to resolve and it took longer than we expected. Might I see you all in the war room downstairs in just a minute so that we may wrap up our business?” 

Pierre translated the words for the two foreign generals. There was a murmur of agreement and then they were all gone. Washington looked at him in the noise of thudding boots and the sound of the army. 

“I understand these are trying personal matters for you,” Washington said, his voice pressed low with intensity. Black glittered in flecks in his eyes, as if his stone self wished to burst forth from the flesh illusion. “But knowing that an old enemy of mine is your enemy, and one of my people has attacked you, makes it even more important that I win this war, and become sovereign, and to do I will need your full intelligence. Otherwise, you are going to make a foolish error and destroy both of us. If you can give me that, you may come. Otherwise, rest until you can do it.” 

“I am ready now, sir,” Alexander said, standing taller and setting his aura in order. The library of King’s College, and nothing was out of order, and all his confusion had to be turned into ferocity and intensity and ingenuity. It was all just another thing to overcome; they were just people he had to prove that he was better than. What else did he do with his life, other than proving that despite his deformities, he was better than everyone? 

Washington did say that if they won the war, his mother’s murderers would be dealt with….

“Better,” the general said, studying him. He gestured. “Now. Downstairs.” 

The generals all stood for Washington, who sat at the head of the table, Alexander at his elbow. John was there too, shooting looks at him. When was he last seen John? The magic was making it impossible for him to figure out in what order things had happened. He had tried to tell John about the magic and then he’d run afoul of the hunters and then Washington had threatened him and … what had happened next? He had been on bedrest? 

“Your most esteemed excellency,” Rochambeau's aide said, in his thick accent, “The Comte insists we discuss the matter of moving south. The French fleet has sent word that this is the best accompaniment for them, and the favorable winds mean that it will take them much less time if they are to move south.”

Another one of these meetings, then, where they accomplished nothing. How could such a thing distract him from all the things that had happened? He hardly needed his whole self to listen to them all argue for an hour. 

Then Washington said to him: “Tell the Comte that I changed my mind, and I do agree that we should move south and reconvene with the French fleet in Richmond or Charleston, wherever is most convenient for them.” 

Everyone who knew English stared at Washington, and then him. Alexander’s stomach did about four loops, and he bit down on the inside of his mouth hard enough that he tasted blood. What about his past had changed the general’s mind? It had to be… 

No. Washington needed him wholly, and he had all confidence Washington would dismiss him if his mind wandered. So he pushed a stray hair out of his eyes to mask the pause and pretended perfect confidence he was sure John and Pierre and maybe Knox would see through. 

“His Excellency is ready to move the army south based on recommendation from the fleet,” Alexander said, and the Comte blinked at him, stunned for a moment by the fact he was not going to spend another hour arguing about it. 

“Colonel,” Rochambeau said to Alexander, this time, “Are you the one who has convinced his Excellency to this course of wisdom? Because if so, you have my most sincere gratitude.”

“I am only one many voices His Excellency has the guidance of, and in the end I mm sure he has many good reasons on when his opinion on such a matter shifts,”

Alexander said, which sounded much nicer in his mouth than the truth.

Rochambeau quirked an eyebrow at him, then spoke to his aide. 

“If His Excellency will observe the map,” The aide said, as Rochambeau spoke a stream of French into his ear. They leaned forward, Rochambeau taking pieces of the map and moving them around, with the aide translating. 

So they actually were going to talk about strategy. Alexander could put his mind towards that. The war would not bring the country forward, but he now had a personal goal as part of it. Washington was right - he would need every scrap of his intelligence. Not just for victory, but for vengeance.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once the plan was agreed upon it all moved quite quickly. Lafayette would go south first, with Sullivan, and Washington would follow, and they would meet the French fleet in a town called Yorktown.

Once the plan was agreed upon it all moved quite quickly. Lafayette would go south first, with Sullivan, and Washington would follow, and they would meet the French fleet in a town called Yorktown. It was wonderful, in a strange way, to just talk about strategy and plans and moving forward. After everything in his own life that seemed an impossible, untangleable mess, nothing felt as good as a strong plan. For once all the generals agreed with each other, and talked honestly about ways the plan could be improved. It was a blessed change. 

Even in the current optimism of the army, it was a bright spot. For the first time since he had woken up and felt Washington’s magic, Alexander felt a little hopeful. They would win the war and become a country that could self-govern and then Washington would become the stone king and together they would hunt down the people who were their enemies. 

There wasn’t time, after, to ask why seeing Alexander’s memory had changed Washington’s mind, though it was obvious that’s what had done it. There was too much to do. There were regiments to select to go south. There were French soldiers to discuss the movement with. There were strategies to organize. There were men to arm. Everyone had to be alerted of what they needed to do; the army itself had to begin packing down and moving out. A massive stack of missives to more distant generals and to congress had to be written and delivered. Everyone needed orders. 

It was just the aides, writing and writing, and following Washington around, and writing some more, and being dictated to, and updating Washington on how things went, and updating everyone else about how things were going. 

The thing Alexander was most disappointed about was that Lafayette was leaving when it seemed like he had just returned. Lafayette had only just updated them on his adventures northward and now he was being shipped off again, down south. Time was of the essence; Lafayette and Sullivan had to beat British regiments to southward. 

Alexander had not been part of the army in a significant way, when they had fled New York. He had been there, sure, but he was more militia then. Certainly he was had not been Washington’s chief staff aide, and now here he was having to coordinate moving the whole army, sans a few divisions that had already left, south. 

There was not really even any time to think about the flashback or the stone fae or the witch. Every moment was filled with people needing his attention for some logistical measure. Even shifting camp around New Jersey and through Pennsylvania had been a challenge. This made that look like child’s play. 

They hauled southward. Alexander helped coordinate the Washington’s schedule, which became even more complicated based on how they all marched hours and hours every day. Even so, everyone wanted the general’s attention. There was so much to do. Even if the skeletons of plan had been made before they began to move, everything changed with the passing miles. The weather was different; soldiers felt rejuvenated or sapped, depending on the day’s march. Supplies, of course, were a constant struggle, what with it seemed like half the supplies always breaking down under the stress at one time or another. 

Washington did not explain further why he had decided to move south, to him or anyone else. The rest of the generals that thought it the correct course seemed to not want to ask, in the possibility he could change his mind. 

What about his past had changed the general’s mind? Was he out to attack the witch, Dinwiddie, and this was the best way to do it? Did he suspect the stone fae that was his enemy was on the marching path somewhere? 

Alexander forced himself not to forget all these things again. He even found time to “practice,” though practice was really just him sitting wherever it was he lived at present and taking a handful of pebbles from his pocket, putting them on his lap, and trying to get angry about things. 

He had caused that rattle with his frustrations. He had simply been so mad, and things seemed so impossible, and he was so required to keep this intense secret - there was no other release. 

It wasn’t hard to pull back up that anger. There were still so many questions, and worse, answers. A man and his alien ally had murdered his mother and tried to murder him and failed. That had put him on the path of his suffering, from the clerkship to the boat to King’s College to here. He had always been a witch, but instead of being murdered he had just been made to forget it. 

A man and his alien ally that Washington knew. When he had been a child, Alexander had known nothing of Washington or Virginia or independence. How could he and the general have been linked already, so many years prior? Had Dinwiddie and his stone fae failed to kill him and, for some reason, focused instead on Washington? 

The puzzlement part of his circumstances didn’t get any results, but all he had to do was think about how it looked like they had struck his mother, and they she had gotten the fever --

\-- _murdered_ \-- 

He managed to rattle the pebble with that, a few times. If nothing else, that was promising. It was about feeling, about will and anger. He had all of that in spades, if nothing else. 

He felt Washington doing magic, too, but Washington was doing something that made it impossible for him to come close. When he’d tried to go over to ask these questions, he had been hit so completely by the sense of the ocean and the clanking of slave chains and the low moans of defeat that he simply could not force himself to move closer. 

They moved south. They received news that the French fleet was winning on the Atlantic. There were skirmishes. A bout of malarial fever, here and there. As they entered Virginia, there was a solid sense of optimism that they seemed to be on the right track. There was even enough optimism that a number of generals and aides told Washington to hurry back from his errands at Mount Vernon, in the concern the war would be over before he got back. 

Virginia was not as good as New York, but it was fine enough. There was even a moment to himself to be had. Washington had been away for three days with four days to go and Alexander had caught up with enough of his work and could vibrate the pebbles enough that he needed to think of a new exercise. 

He was admiring the starry sky on the warm night, feeling pleasantly buzzed by a bit of whiskey, when he was approached by two men. One was a courier. The other wore strange livery. 

“This one is Colonel Hamilton,” said a courier. 

“Colonel Hamilton,” said the man in livery, “His Excellency General George Washington requests your presence in his estate. If you would accompany me posthaste.” 

Alexander stood a bit too quickly given the whiskey. The courier very gracefully caught him, and the livery man had enough professional courtesy not to say anything. 

“At his estate?” He echoed. What could Washington possibly want with him on his grounds? 

“Your presence is quite urgent; His Excellency promises to answer your questions upon your arrival.” 

Alexander restrained himself to only giving the livery man a very skeptical look. “Will you let the other aides know where I’ve gone?” 

“Yes, Colonel,” said the courier. 

The livery man - the livery of Mount Vernon, it had to be - turned, and Alexander followed him through the camp to a pair of very beautiful-looking horses. These were champions in comparison to the starving things they rode in the army. 

“The ride is not too long, sir,” said the livery man, mounting one of the horses. Alexander took a breath and mounted the other, hoping the ride wouldn’t make him vomit. “Although unfortunately I will not be able to answer your questions along the way. His Excellency did not see fit to provide an explanation for your call, but he impressed the necessity of it’s urgency.”

“I am not offended,” Alexander said, “Lead the way.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was not impossible, but not likely, this was a war question.

It was not impossible, but not likely, this was a war question that he was requested to go to Mount Vernon for. For a man made of stone, Washington held a peculiar reverence for his home estate. Alexander had seen him more than once refer to his estate talk as a reward for his war duty. 

Did that mean that this would be an issue of magic? When had Washington ever called him for issues of magic? It almost seemed equally as unlikely. In terms of scale, Alexander felt like a flea in comparison to the majestic stallion that was his commander. It had been bad enough when he had only been colonel and Washington had been general. Now there was an even grander distance between them, all these questions and mysteries and background that Washington seemed to have answers - at least guesses of answers - for, when he had nothing. 

And if it was a magical issue, why did Washington not simply pull him Below and ask him whatever questions he had? Was there some distance Washington could extend, and Mount Vernon was too far away? 

Washington’s liveried servant, Alexander wagered, would not have the answers. Alexander detected not a touch of magic from him, either of stone or otherwise. It sounded like, from Pierre’s explanation anyway, that witches were not into spending a lot of time conversing with fae anyway. Alexander, for one, could not deny that Washington’s lack of humanity was disconcerting. The otygaruth, even intelligent, had just been a monster, and that was easier to process once you got over the horror of the thing. That Washington was engaged in this elaborate lie for his otherworldly goals was still a hard pill to swallow. 

Was the fifty some-odd years Washington had been alive nothing in fae years? Stone was an age old, after all. Was Washington as old as the earth? The sun? 

Alexander snapped back to reality. It seemed that this area of Virginia had been largely untouched by the war, at least; the trees were beautiful with their many-colored leaves of autumn, and it was not yet cold enough to be horrifying. He had even eaten breakfast today, a biscuit and a cup of coffee. He understood the respite a man could have from the war, with just this ride, even though he knew abstractly whatever Washington wanted from him at his home could be worse. 

It was only a few hours of a ride before they came across the beginnings of what must have been Mount Vernon. Alexander could not suppress a gasp. The liveryman cleared his throat and began to talk about the history of the estate and the names and significance of the places they passed. Apparently the estate had belonged to Washington’s brother, and then the brother’s wife, and then finally passed to him; it had been named for the brother’s commander in a previous war. Bits had been bought here and there; Washington selected this and that type of tree. 

“His Excellency has spectacular landscapers,” Alexander said, when there was a pause. 

“His Excellency has a personal hand in all selections made on the estate,” The liveryman replied. A secret grin curled on the side of his mouth. “The landscapers would be quicker if things did not need to be personally reviewed and approved.” 

“Personally?” Alexander said, because it seemed baffling that a stone man would care so much or have such spectacular taste. Washington did not need to personally review things to be important or seem powerful, Alexander was sure. He did it because he desired to? 

“Indeed, sir.” 

They passed over the soft roll of a hill and what must of been the main building came into view. It was huge, and also under construction to be made larger. Alexander could not resist staring. 

“The main home,” the liveryman said, as if it wasn’t obvious. He took the reigns of Alexander’s horse and lead them close. 

Washington was standing on the front porch in front of the door, his hands folded behind him. He was out of uniform, which was oddly disconcerting. He wore instead an elaborate blue jacket and an ornate waistcoat with embroidered grey designs that reminded Alexander of veins in a rock wall. 

“His Excellency, General George Washington,” The liveryman said as he slid off his horse. He offered his hand to Alexander, but he ignored it, dismounting as he tried to restrain his awe of the house. 

“Thank you, Higgins,” Washington said, to the liveryman, “Colonel. Welcome to my home. If you would come with me.” 

“Yes, sir,” Alexander said, trying to gather his composure as Washington lead him inside. Another liveryman - black, Alexander noticed, who did not meet his eyes - took his jacket. They walked through a main hallway. That the house was mostly empty made it seem even larger. The army slept two to the bed when there was one available, and plenty of them slept on the ground or in groups, for warmth. Washington, meanwhile, had -- this. 

“I thought you didn’t control people,” Alexander said, watching the black back of a man keeping close to the wall, as if the man could will himself into into being invisible to them. 

“Being obtuse does not suit you,” Washington said, without looking at him, "If you know nothing about Virginia, know that it is all but required.”

“It’s monstrous,” Alexander said, thinking of the port and the chains and the low moans of horror, “You seem so careful about not using your power in overt ways, and… you do.” 

“If you wanted to be a good king, you would rule over free people.” Alexander hissed, letting the acid creep into his voice. 

“Enough,” Washington said, and Alexander heard the vibrating edge of grinding stone. He felt creeping dust in his throat, and suppressed the cough even if he felt the warning. Easy anger for his work with the pebbles, he thought. His general was a fake man who desired freedom and liberty and yet he owned these people. 

Washington stopped suddenly enough that Alexander nearly walked in to him. They were in the end of a hallway that lead into an open construction space. There were no workers here at present, only exposed woodwork and the construction of the walls. The place struck at his sense like brambles, and he took a surprised step back. 

“Yes,” Washington said, like Alexander had made some comment he agreed with, “You do feel it. I thought you might.” Another pause, and he offered a hand. “There is an entrance here, to another space. Take my hand.” 

“Can I not access it myself?” If he concentrated he could make out the magic more specifically. There was a secret hole in the floor, as if on could step and hit a basement floor. He took an experimental step forward and felt nothing but wood under his feet, and yet…

“How much stone fae can you pretend to be?” 

Alexander put his hand in his pocket and felt the pebbles he kept there. 

“As much as I need,” he said, lifting his chin. 

Washington took a step away from him and folded his hands behind his back, looking at him in a thoughtful manner. It was not quite the look he expected. It was the look Washington gave when he was weighing his options. Was he concerned that Alexander would damage the portal or expose them to hunters or hurt himself in some way? 

“Can you?” he asked, more to himself than Alexander, “I did feel you doing magic, on the march. Rudimentary, yes, but magic nonetheless. Although it is hard for me to say whether the door will accommodate you.”

“Let me try,” he said, and gave the floor below a gentle tap, as if he could make the wood panels fall away reveal whatever Below was hidden. “Or is there only one chance?” 

Then Washington gave a twitch of a smile at him. “No. It is not that there is only one try. But first I must do something.” 

“What?”

He tilted his head, like Alexander had stepped in some trap of his. The look set his senses - magical or otherwise - on edge. 

Then, Washington reached out to him in a beckoning gesture that hummed with power. All of a sudden dust clogged his throat and a stab of pain wrenched in his stomach. It was like he had eaten something rotten; he felt every bit of him trying to clench and repulse. It was not like how he felt when he drank too much, although he was confident that the result was going to be the same. 

He took a staggered step forward and his knees hit the wooden floor, gasping between retching coughs. It was hard to breathe in the dust, and worse because there didn’t seem like that many opportunities to breathe. A wave of nausea struck him afterwards, forcing him to his elbows and his knees in the struggle. Did he have to die to prove he could walk through this gate? 

A lump formed his throat that reminded him a sob. He pulled himself to a hand and reached out to Washington with the other one; surely this was some necessarily punishment, for he had done nothing, only dared to improve, and be better, and as a reward the world was hazy and stone grey and his whole body revolted. Different than his fevers, and worse because now he had a new sense and part of his body to be attacked, and oh, it was --

The hand hit the ground again and he coughed, once and twice, and the lump in his throat came up and hit the ground with a clatter. Along with the lump went the pain, and all he was left with was the resulting gasps as his body worked to restore the missing oxygen it has lost. 

Washington bent into his vision and picked up the lump, and then reached under his arms and helped him to his feet, holding his weight until he was sure he could stand 

The world slowly stopped spinning. “Did I pass your death test?” he managed, with a bitter cough at the end, “Or is that your punishment for my attempt? Could you have not warned me that you intended me to vomit into oblivion?!” 

“It would have been worse if you expected it,” Washington said, without the slightest bit of remorse. “I will tell you what I did once we see whether you can pass through the gate now.” 

“Tell me what you did!” 

“No.”

Alexander grit his teeth and took a step back. He could still feel the gate under him, but it was different. Washington had done something to him, even if he couldn’t tell what it was. Washington had -- he furrowed his brow and tried to understand his collective of parts. He was different. The gate felt different. Washington felt different, too. Distant, somehow, even though Washington stood right in front of him. 

“Did you … mute my stone power?” 

“In a manner of speaking,” Washington said. He tapped his foot on the invisible magic hole in the floor. “I will give it back, but first I want to see whether you can go through the door without it.” 

“Why?” 

“I will explain it to you after you see whether you can access the portal.” 

“You can’t simply take someone else’s power away and not tell them why!” 

"I can, and in fact, I am doing right now." Washington folded his hands behind his back and blinked at him, waiting, as unchangeable as the stone he was made of. Somehow it felt entirely too similar to their arguments about war strategy and logistics. Some of them Washington conceded, but not most of them. Not this one. 

Alexander took a step back and reached his hand into the pocket for his pebbles again. They felt less vibrant in his hand, but there was still something there. He would just need to be angrier, feel more. That was easy, right now. He took a step onto where he knew the gate to be and clenched the stones in his hand. All he had to to was think about that Washington toyed with him, and took away, and took away, and took away, with no explanation. All he had to think of was the black bodies outside this weird space that had no agency. All he had to do was think of the witch that came into his house with that stone fae and had left his mother a fevered wreck and him ignorant of his history. All he had to do was think of dock and the low moans of misery and the crack of the whip. He thought of those poor souls put onto some horrifying prison ship and shipped to Virginia and bought like they were objects and pretended into being no more than furniture in this very estate --

\--- his stomach, as well as the floor, dropped out from under him. 

He was in a cave. Stone Washington was standing there, looking at him in an astonished manner. 

“You never do cease to amaze, Colonel,” he said, in an approving manner. 

“Now tell me what you did,” Alexander hissed. The anger was still fresh. Washington did not even need to have slaves. He did it just to impress people. It was a station thing, for his game. 

From nowhere Washington revealed a smooth grey stone and displayed it in his fist. “I gave you this to swallow, when we first learned about your power. Do you remember?” 

Alexander rubbed his throat and realized with a jolt what happened. 

“This stone is part of me,” Washington said, “A portion of my power is inside it. Up until now, some part of any magic you did was assisted, in a way, by me.” He folded his hand closed around the stone again, “I needed it back to give you stone speech. I decided that if you wanted to try your own skill, it should be your skill indeed.” 

Alexander wasn't sure how to feel about that in that moment. Out of all the things that had happened, he thought that that revelation might be the overall strangest. Inside him had been a part of Washington, in some sense. He’d swallowed a bit of the general and a bit of the magic this being possessed. It had helped, and now he felt strangely bereft without it. 

He took a breath. It was a handicap, that was all. He had passed through the floor without it, after all. 

“What do you benefit from giving it back to me?” Alexander asked. That was the crux of the matter. If Washington gave a way a bit of himself, he had to be more vulnerable, wasn’t he? Perhaps no one truly threatened him, but even so, Washington was always serious about losing a portion of his war force. Was this much different?

“In a way it allows me to observe you,” Washington said, “And gives me a measure of control.” 

His eyes went wide, and he took a step back. Washington watched him, slate eyes unblinking. 

He thought of all the times it felt like he was choked with sand. “Does it bring you joy, to make me a slave like them?” Alexander said, with every bit of venom he could muster. 

“Does it bring you comfort to think that you are?” Washington asked, the bored disinterest evident in his tone and posture. The rage seemed to bounced off him like bullets on stone, leaving otherwise unimportant chips. “Because I must confess, it is a strange slavery that the one in bondage has to be told about it.” He turned away from Alexander and walked towards a rough-hewn wall glittering with silvery veins. “Although it is not unreasonable that you are angry because I could have taken the opportunity to be upfront with you about it, and I was not. I apologize for that. However, we are on a schedule, and I must ask you to shout about it at some other time.” 

Alexander opened his mouth to retort, but Washington touched the wall and and the wall within the outline of the silvery ore veins ceased to be. It did not turn into a tunnel or path to somewhere else. It was not like the black of night, where you could be certain there were things even if you could not see them. This void was so black, so effortlessly nothing, so absolutely empty, that he took a staggered step back and glanced up at the manor that could have collapsed in on them. 

Thankfully, it didn’t. 

Washington waited for him to gather his sense and stop boggling at the sheer lack in the middle of the wall. Then, once he had Alexander's attention, he spoke. “The reason I am here is that I needed to communicate with the council - a stone congress, if you will - that a human I have just learned is actually a witch and that I consider a valuable ally was significantly damaged by a stone fae allied with another witch who hid himself from me and frustrated me politically for years. That this is a a coincidence seems highly unlikely. The reason you are here is that the stone council wishes to learn more about the attack done to you, so the fae in question can be more thoroughly judged for their treason.” 

“Treason? Are you so important, to your council?” Alexander echoed, puzzled. Even if you acknowledged all the insanity, that Alexander was known as an ally of Washington before they knew each other, and he had been attacked to harm Washington in some way -- well, in this insane world that seemed a valid type of attack. 

“Yes,” Washington said, “I am the sole representative of the stone fae to be fae sovereign. By hindering me, you hinder all stone fae - the whole collection, as we are called. It is powerful zealotry, or intense blackmail or bribery, to drive a fae against their own kind, and cannot be treated lightly. Unlike humans, it is quite uncommon for there to be such schisms in a collection.”

Not only the army was a pawn in the game of Washington’s people, then, but he was as well, for Washington’s enemies. 

On one hand, there was something satisfying about being an element that set Washington back, when he so carelessly used the war for his own ends. On the other hand … did he not generally agree with Washington? Had the man - fae, as it was - not pushed the cause forward in ways that made him indispensable? 

He had done it, after all, with Alexander in this weakened state. 

“So,” Alexander said, trying to keep all the threads separate in his head, and also make an effort to stop from going insane, “You report to your government that you have a traitor, on evidence of a Wreck, and they wish to see the Wreck?” 

“Astute as ever.” 

“And they are… in that hole?” He gestured. Alexander had been in battlefields and burning ships and impossible marches and facing gunfire. Those were knowable, seeable things, though. The hole was an unknowable nothing. 

“Yes.” 

“There is something on the other side of it?” 

“Many things, but no light.” 

Alexander took another step back from the hole in the wall and took a breath, trying to gather his confidence. As if to comfort himself, he took in their current position. It was like Below. They were actually underground, he suspected. The dim light of the room came from the silvery metal veins in the walls, not the strange impossible mist. The ground under his feet was dirt, not stone. The walls themselves look as if they had been exploded into this cavern, rougher and more unhewn, less perfect. 

“Are we underneath Mount Vernon?” 

“Yes,” Washington said. 

“Are you worried you could collapse your house?” 

“No,” Washington said, with a hint of amusement, “Any earth touched by my magic is in fact much stronger.”

Think, Alexander, he told himself, trying to put all the pieces into place. Of course Washington would never let Mount Vernon fall on him. Concentrate on the important things. He wished, very dearly, for a pen. It might all have made sense, if he wrote it down. Instead all he had was this little room, maybe a bit bigger than the bedroom in his most recent house, and Washington, and the pebbles in his pocket, and this hole into nothing that was something. What else was there? 

There was the stone he had coughed up. That was the next step. Washington had taken the stone from his chest. He had talked about giving it stone speech. That was the direction. 

“Is it an interrogation by your congress?” he asked, feeling a little more on track, “Is that why you needed to reveal the stone to me and give it stone speech?” 

Despite the carved face, something about Washington softened. Alexander thought only at that moment how much pressure the general - human or not - was under, and not only from the army. Strange to think that despite the scale, Alexander realized all over again it was the same. Washington carried some impossibly challenging because alone, and he answered to some politicians who probably did not understand a quarter of the challenge of it. 

“No,” Washington said, “Most fae go their entire very long lives without meeting a human and only a small percentage speak to witches. The opinion my people tend to have of witches, nonetheless humans, is … not favorable. It would be like you asking the opinion of a horse as you pulled the musket ball from it’s flank.” 

Alexander’s eyebrows went up at that. “If your opinions pass for kind and generous…” 

Washington nodded. “I think, though, that you would benefit from overhearing the conversation. Perhaps, in your way, you could get them to answer your questions.” 

“I’ll let the army that while they in fact think you cold and distant, this is what it looks like when you care. I am sure they will think you warmer, for it.” he said, a smile creeping at the corner of his mouth. It was a defense, in some way. 

At that, Washington looked pensive. He looked up and down Alexander's body, then glanced up at the ceiling and perhaps the manor above. “Though I know you jest, the truth is I have come to find great pleasure the human company that I keep. Witches, generally, are detestable, but humans…” There was a pull at the corner of stone lips. “...Yes. I think I do have great care for some.” 

“I find stone fae generally detestable as well, but some are adequate.” 

Washington actually did chuckle at that. Then, with a clear of his throat, he folded his hand closed and opened it again, to reveal a stone. When he offered, Alexander took it and tried to match it up to the first stone - had it been different? If it was all sort of a part of Washington, were they the same? This one seemed light, for its appearance. It had seemed larger in Washington’s hand and even larger when he’d choked it up. In his palm it seemed a reasonable size - a large swallow but a swallow nonetheless. It was warm and, in the strange light of the glowing veins of the cavern, seemed unearthly indeed. 

There was a story there, Alexander knew. There was a story about how Washington had been assigned or chosen their world, and perhaps in the beginning he had thought them all stupid or insane or ridiculous, but now they were here and he was giving away a piece of himself so that Alexander could listen to some stone congress discuss his unknown past. 

“You need to decide now, if you are going to accept that assistance, with the implications it holds,” Washington said again, and the thoughtful mood was broken. Urgent. Just like talking to real Congress, Alexander couldn’t help but think. “And then you should take my hand. And, if it is not too much a request, that you follow any cues of mine, with the stone council.” 

Alexander looked at the hole and the outstretched hand and the stone that he held. He took in Washington’s carved face, trying to read him. It wasn’t harder, comically enough, now that he was so different. He wasn’t really that different, honestly. Washington was hurried, and concerned. Those were normal feelings, for Washington.

He swallowed the stone and felt it disappear into himself. He felt a surge in his power, and then, unexpectedly, drawn to the hole in his wall. He felt the cool, stone hand offered to him. He could sense Washington's magic within that hand, could feel in that impossible way the mountains in the distance, and impossible age of unseen cliffs, and the pressure of underground. 

_Do you understand me?_ came a muted voice from under him. He looked at Washington, surprised, and then at the ground, and then with a start bent down to pull off his boots and socks. The dirt was cold. 

_How about now?_ rumbled those hums and vibrations in his feet. He heard them both as the scrape of pebbles over one another and also Washington’s voice, as it had always been. 

“I heard it.” 

_Excellent_ , Washington rumbled through the ground at him. He gave their joined hands a soft pull.

“How much worse can the stone council be than our Congress?” he asked, as they took a step towards the hole. 

Washington did actually smile at that, just at the corner of his mouth. “It is all exactly the same. By such, I mean they are sufficiently worse.” 

Alexander took a deep breath. They walked into the void.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You should try your very hardest not to vomit_ , Washington rumbled to him, and then they were
> 
> in -- the --
> 
> \--- **wall** \---

For a brief, impossible fraction of a hint of a moment, they were nowhere, desolate and empty and endless. They were in the horrifying void that the hole was. There was no pressure - there was no nothing, and his body rebelled, unfamiliar and confused. A horrifying wave of nausea hit him, and he felt whatever he’d eaten last rise. Only it did not rise -- there was nothing he had eaten -- he had no stomach -- he had no body -- he had --

\--- Then they were somewhere again.

It was a strange somewhere, but a somewhere nonetheless. It was not home, even if home was a ratty shack where they slept three to the bed. It was not home like the island or the docks, because the docks were home, in comparison to this place. They were in some new Below, with all its eerie ethereality.

The first thing Alexander felt about the place was the pressure. He felt like he was in the ocean, and the water pressed in on him in all sides.

There was light, though, despite what Washington - a soft glow that came off the rock that surrounded him They were in some impossible, incredible cavern, where even the air he breathed was dense and hard. The rocks were set in impossible shapes, in massive spikes that dangled from the ceiling and jutting like teeth from the floor. In both were glow-lined holes that Alexander could only see if he squinted. Around every which way went stone lines like rivers or roads, between the hanging things and at every height of the place, which seemed to stretch up towards heaven, if there even was such a thing.

“You’re from here?” he said, but there was something strange about his voice. It was not quite soft, but it was --- it did not carry.

_It did not occur to me that the air does not travel enough to carry your voice,_ Washington rumbled, the sound coming again up through his bare feet. _So you can still generate the sounds, but I imagine it will be a struggle to have them be heard. Sound is much different, among my kind._

“Did you know?” Alexander said, but Washington shook his head.

_Follow me._

Washington lead them, hands still joined, through what seemed to be the main thoroughfare of the place. Alexander could hardly concentrate to think about talking in a new way. There were no storefronts or houses. None of the structures seemed to have doors. Everything was impossibly massive - you could have fit the whole army in one of these pillars and still had room to space. Veins of something rare glittered in the strange light of other stones. It was beautiful and impossibly, horrifically alien all at once.

“Where are all the other stone fae?” he asked, though Washington did not seem to hear him. He thought about his feet and mountains and rumbles and tried to force thought downward.

Washington must have heard something at that moment, because he turned and looked back at him with alarmed face.

_Congratulations on your indistinguishable scream, and thank you for announcing our arrival._ Washington rumbled at him, disapproving. Rock voice could be chastising, Alexander learned.

He let Washington pull him through the place, trying to take it in and practice his rock talking at the same time. He kept the other hand in his pocket, holding the tiny pebbles that he kept. They hummed in his palm, or maybe that was him humming against the rocks, or maybe it was the air that vibrated between them. He took another deep breath, trying to get past the strangeness of the air and the impossibility of the street. The thoroughfare was narrowing in every direction; above him was a true ceiling, where streaks of some sort of glowing mold lived, and then there were visible walls now, still with the glowing metal veins.

Another breath. Something easy and confident that he could think, that he could turn to into stone talking. _I am Alexander Hamilton,_ he thought, but Washington did not reply. Too soft, maybe. He felt the hard, cool floor under his toes and tried to think only of the contact between him and this impossible place./i > I am Alexander Hamilton, he thought again, and this time Washington looked back at him.

_Better. Rudimentary, but better. I do not advise displaying it to the council. As I said, they do not have a high opinion of you; do not reinforce it._

Alexander scowled at him. Then, when Washington was looking, he gestured to the street, and then pointed to Washington, then gestured again.

Washington stopped and watched the display or a moment. Where are my kind?

Alexander nodded.

_We have entered into the portal entrance of the leadership caste,_ Washington said. _They do not prefer to take shapes, but instead be within stone. This form that I wear, it is primarily for convenience in communicating with others. My kind do not immediately come associated with bodies, like humans and witches. We are energy or spirits, first._

Alexander stared at him.

_I am happy to address it more later. Also, you can sense for my people and will find them. Not here, however -- we are coming to the council chambers. It is an exclusive area._

Washington turned back and kept walking straight, ignoring the lowering of the ceiling and the compression of the walls. Finally, they came upon a dead end. Here it was tiny - perhaps three soldiers could have linked arms and stood side-by-side, and only another man or two could stand on his shoulders.

He stared at his feet again and clenched his pebbles in his pocket. First, to crystalize the thought; _where do we go next?_ Then, to make it feel like stones and mountains and metal, and then to send it as calmly as he could down into his feet…

Washington touched the dead end and nodded to himself.

_Are you ready? I can guarantee your safety, though I suspect some unpleasantness lies before us. Remember, there will be no light, thought you will know the council with magic._

Alexander grit his teeth and nodded. What could be worse than everything had been up to this moment, after all? Some aliens who thought he was as dumb as a beast was par for the course, wasn’t it?

Washington let go of Alexander’s hand and instead wrapped him in another peculiar hug. Alexander wrapped his arms around Washington’s forearms, knowing something horrible and impossible was about to happen.

_You should try your very hardest not to vomit_ , Washington rumbled to him, and then they were

in -- the --

\--- **wall** \---

the pressure made him smaller than a speck, crushing his organs and bones together, shoving him together in whatever configuration was possible. He thought he might have screamed, had he had a mouth. There was no air -- there was no mouth --

\--- the pressure eased. his body reasserted itself, in some matter of it, at least. he was in deep black and everything shook and he was sincerely glad that Washington was holding him because he was not certain if there was a floor, or a ceiling. It was like the nightmare version of when the stone had tried to reach out to him. He sucked in some raspy breaths and felt his stomach revolting at the impossibility of it, twisting.

_I won’t!_ he might have shouted, or maybe just thought, quite loudly. Sense, he told himself, to fight the feeling of being held over a cliff. _Sense, goddamnit!! Find something!_

Something was there. Many somethings, in fact. Washington, all around him, like rainfall, or fog. He truly wanted nothing more than to be able to cling to the feeling of the stern general, though there was nothing to hold. He was not sure if he even had hands to hold it, but he could not think about that. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself (if he had arms - he was sure there was a _himself_ , in some form) and felt Washington draw him closer. He was being protected, somehow. It was an unbelievable relief and it eased off some of the panic.

There were other somethings around him. They were stone fae somethings, like cats resembled each other. They filled up the remaining space - he could not feel past them, if it was possible. How many were there, he tried to feel. Were there many, like a shouting congress session? Was it like a king and his advisors? The feeling of one merged into another, like cloud. He wished that had had practiced sensing more, rather than making pebbles in his hand shake. He had never been particularly artistic but he would have been desperate for paints. ****

******SHOW THE WRECK****** rumbled one fae, loudly enough that Alexander felt a pebble in his pocket turn to dust, even if he wasn’t sure if he had either pebbles or a pocket.

The voice said something at the end, that Alexander did not understand, which stirred Washington to action. A bit of Washington’s power disappeared from him, like someone had ripped off his jacket during December. He recoiled from the exposure, but the other stone fae came closer. They felt him, and for all the times he had said Washington was cold and strange-feeling this was a hundred times worse. The feeling scraped his skin raw. ****

******THERE ARE STONE REMNANTS TO THIS GLAMOUR,**  **** ********

******GREAT TREASON INDEED.** **** Another touch of the other fae, harder this time, like a bruise. He bit back the wince. ****

_It must be punished_ , Washington rumbled at them. In comparison to the shaking of the other fae, Washington sounded downright demure. _I have been set at a great disadvantage._ ****

******ONE NOT OF YOUR OWN DOING** , ****said a third. This one was a riverbed, worn and bruised and smooth. **UNUSUAL**.

Alexander hated the riverbed instantly. He grit his teeth, if had teeth to grit. “He doesn’t need advantages to be victorious on your behalf,” he snarled, or at least intended to snarl.

The whole group of fae directed their attention at him.

_Humans by default interact by using their voice muscles to modify the air to structure it into communicative sound forms._ Washington said, like an explanation. So his snarl had at least had some effect on the stone, or the air. Had they been real words? Had these stone beings understood him? ****

******IT COMMUNICATES TO US?** **** rumbled the riverbed.it came closer, rough like the rocks in the Schuylkill.

_Me_ ** ** _,_**** Washington replied. _The witch is one of my most capable allies. It makes the damage against him more significant._

He turned his sense to focus on the mass of Washington's power. “You know I didn't.”

“I can sufficiently assure you that you do not want to upset them.” Washington said - said, with sound, from nowhere, sufficiently startling Alexander. His disembodied voice was tense. “Do not try.”

******WE WILL LEARN THE TRAITOR,** **** said the quarry, and the magic-sound of it boomed all around Alexander, like an echo. All of a sudden, he was bereft of the sense of Washington's protection. He was alone in this vast, impossible place with only the rumbling of stone voices. His hackles rose, and impossible claustrophobia overtook the overwhelming emptiness. The stone senses of Washington’s council were upon him.

He stumbled backwards and reached for a pistol that wasn’t there. The stone magic did not know the threat of the action. They overtook him. It was sufficiently different and no less unpleasant from whatever the otygaruth did. With the otygaruth it had been like someone finding some bruise of his and jabbing their fingers into it, as hard as they could; the stone council had a surgical precision, and rather than thumbs there were knives.

Alexander had never been interested in anatomy. He never attended the dissection lectures, unless he did so to impress someone. He felt like he was on that table now, these things impassively reaching into him and examining. They pulled and stretched in impossible ways, and he screamed, and somehow then they pulled harder, and stretched further, and if he had seams they threatened to rip apart, and then --

Washington, reaching out and stuffing him back together, easing the tension. Washington sewed him up and stood him back on his metaphorical feet.

The council - the mountain - rumbled something incomprehensible, like a rockslide. It was distressed.

_It can be slain with more investigation. It lives and can die, and it is needed for my cause._ Washington said. ****

******IT LIVES AND CAN DIE?** The mountain asked. Questioning.

_You will end its usefulness,_ Washington explained. _You will assist the traitor._

**WE KNOW ENOUGH,** said the quarry, **IF WE NEED MORE, WE WILL.**

Washington’s magic surrounded him again. Strange comfort, but that’s what it was. Alexander let himself go limp in every way possible. Everything hurt. Areas of his body he was sure had not even existed hurt. Everything hurt so much he could hardly find the energy to care about Washington and his council. Washington held him, though. Washington’s calm, easy and cool, made it easier to not care. Strange to think you could be comforted by your stern general, and yet. It was an effort to stay conscious. There was not only the pain, which thumped through him, but a long exhaustion that hovered along with it. He was tired and held - the perfect combination.

_I will depart for the mortal plane,_ Washington said.

**YES** , said the mountain.

**YES** , said the quarry.

**YES** , said the riverbed.

_I will ascend, when I return,_ Washington said.

**SEE TO IT** , said the riverbed.

“What an asshole,” Alexander muttered, and he heard something rattle in the space. It took him a few moments to figure it out. A laugh. Washington, laughing. It was even more strangely reassuring than being held.

“You can rest,” Washington said to him, from somewhere close. Somehow the permission was all he needed to drift off.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alexander came to in an exquisite bed. He shot up to a sitting position.

Alexander came to in an exquisite bed. He shot up to a sitting position. 

He was in a real place, with solid things, that he could see. 

The bed was impossibly soft, with four posters and a hazy cloth that hid the rest of the room from view. There was a dim sunlight from a window. 

Everything did still hurt, and the worst ache was somewhere in his sense, which of course moved to a different place anytime he tried to pin it down. 

He winced and climbed out of the tall bed. His bare feet hit a warm rug, and he studied the bedroom. It was elaborately decorated, with a painting of a rolling hillside, and several beautiful wood pieces of furniture, and embroidered window coverings, pulled to the side so the sunlight could stream in. 

His uniform was folded on the parlor table, with his boots to the side. He was wearing only his breeches and undershirt. He hurried over there first, pulling on his overshirt. 

“You look well,” Washington said from the doorway, startling him as he was pulling his arm through a sleeve. His general was human again, or at least pretending it, and wore his familiar’s general uniform, although this one was obviously brand new, crisp and bright in the room sun. Strange, and twice that, given that it seemed the man did nothing other than answer to annoying politicians, human or otherwise. Even though he knew it was a lie, Alexander took comfort in the facade. It was a relief for everything for everything to seem like him again, after everything being so impossibly alien. 

“Everything hurts, sir,” he responded, which was true. He pulled down on the jacket, to make sure it sat well on him, and then sat at the parlor chair to start pulling on his boots. 

“At least you are alive,” Washington replied, “And unharmed, in the scale of ways you could be harmed.” 

Alexander looked up from where he was tightening his ragged laces to quirk an eyebrow at him. “I don’t feel unharmed,” he replied, with an edge to his voice. He could recall with perfect clarity the sense of being pulled; he could feel the seams of himself still recovering, somehow. He had both the thought that it seemed impossible he could have gone his whole life without knowing exactly where he was stitched together, and wishing to go back to that ignorance. 

Washington tilted his head. He watched Alexander stand and straighten himself up.

“Do we rejoin the army now?” Alexander asked, “And your council hunts down the person or thing or fae who did this to me, because it affected your chances at winning?” 

“Yes,” Washington said. He pulled his arms behind his back and stepped through the room, looking out over the window. 

“Do you think they’ll find the--” a pause, and he settled on a word, “fae that did this?” 

“I think so, although of course such things can never be guaranteed.” He paused for a contemplative moment, then turned back towards Alexander. “Allow me to apologize for the behavior of the council. As I said, none of them have ever met a human, and likely a witch only a long, long time ago.” 

Alexander couldn’t help but laugh. “They didn’t even understand when I spoke to them. And they don’t even know what speech is?” Or…. “ A pause. He thought back to the rumbling of conversation, of voices like sone grinding against stone, of sharpening flint, tumbling pebbles against each other. “They didn’t know what life and death were? They were definitely alive.” 

Washington frowned. He looked out the window again, and this time Alexander came to stand next to him. There was the rolling fields, the beautiful pathways, the trees beginning to turn colors. In the distance were fields and black backs struggling in the sun. 

“Fae do not instinctively understand death like humans do. Our consciousness follows a different cycle. I knew already there was a strong possibility the council might wish to push you past a living limit to investigate your Wreck, because they do not understand what a living limit is. I was prepared to protect you from it.”

“What a relief,” Alexander said, his voice dry, “They only nearly killed me out ignorance, and not malice. The riverbed would have surely shed a stony tear.” 

“The riverbed?” Washington echoed. 

“The one that doubted you.” 

A quirk of a smile flit over the general’s lip. “It has always doubted my methods. The riverbed is called --” here Washington did some kind of rumble that Alexander felt only in a muted away, perhaps because they were on the second floor and he wore boots. A name. The riverbed had a name. -- “And it has doubted me from the moment I claimed my space to compete on behalf of my people. Suffice it to say that many other fae challengers build themselves up as princes, or noble advisors, or other assorted royalty. They do not decide to start as middling gentry and work their way into rebel generalship. But as in this rebellion, taking the easy path does not have the results I require, as George Washington or otherwise.” 

Alexander watched him move back through the bedroom and towards the door. 

“If you feel well enough to travel, then we should be back to the army as promptly as we can manage with conventional means. I cannot be away too long; I can only imagine what sort of fits the other generals have gotten themselves into.”

“Oh, I have certainly been worse battered than this,” Alexander answered, because it was the truth. Sure, he was incredibly sore, but he was pretty sure it was not worse than a bad summer fever, or that time that he had fallen off the horse escaping New York, or recovering from one battle or another. He stood himself a little taller, and followed Washington through the house, trying not to be so visibly distressed about the people who kept it so spotless.

“Go with my man, colonel,” Washington said, gesturing to a man lin livery near the doorway. It was the same man that had brought him to the estate, “I have a few small matters to attend to, and then I will be with you.” 

The man bowed to Alexander and escorted him to the stables.

“Sir,” Alexander said to the back of the man’s head, “Does His Excellency not seem otherworldly to you, sometimes?” he asked. He did not feel the press of seabird talons or horrifying raptor eyes on him, at that moment. 

The man looked back at him, evidently puzzled. As a regular person would be, Alexander thought. “I suppose so,” the man said, after a moment, “I suppose I am always astonished by his many great features. His great holdings, and his capabilities in the war, and still his attention to his properties even now. If it is not untoward of me to ask, what brings the question?” 

“I, too, am impressed by the capability in which he handles everything,” Alexander answered. It was the truth, if only a fraction of it. Certainly he would have personally been abysmal at pretending to be something so significantly different from what he really was. “But this is all I have ever known of his holdings.” 

The liveryman seemed satisfied with the answer. “If you knew how capably he managed his estates, you would have no doubts of his capability in war.”

“I do not need to know his estates to know that with him at our helm, victory is assured.” 

To come so far and be so much and not win…..

The liveryman nodded, then bowed a quick little bow, eyes flitting over Alexander’s shoulder. Washington was there, as strong and proud as always. Another person, appearing out of the shadows, brought around Blueskin for him. 

“I believe we are quite ready, Colonel?” Washington asked him. 

He pulled himself onto a provided horse. “By your leave, Your Excellency.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How is it...” Alexander asked, in amazement, “That after all of this impossibility, after learning that you are -- fae, and that there is so much more at stake for you -- I am still amazed by something so inane like you leaving your guard behind? You can’t even be hurt by stray Tories, can you?”

“I must admit,” Alexander said, watching the forever of the road, “I expected there would be an honor guard.” 

“There was,” Washington replied. He looked over at Alexander, with a smile at the corner of his mouth, “I suspect they will all be greatly distressed, but they know of my habit to try and slip them, and mostly they will chastise themselves for not realizing the obvious circumstances that has permitted me to do it this time.” 

A moment of comprehension, and then Alexander laughed in disbelief. “Did you just leave them somewhere?” 

“Indeed I have. Although not just any _somewhere_ , but at home. They will all wake up and at some point realize that I am not there.” 

“How is it...” Alexander asked, in amazement, “That after all of this impossibility, after learning that you are -- fae, and that there is so much more at stake for you -- I am still amazed by something so inane like you leaving your guard behind? You can’t even be hurt by stray Tories, can you?” 

“Not men with guns, no.” Washington bent his head to scratch Blueskin’s mane, “As for your amazement at my hobbies… that, I leave for you to figure out yourself.” 

They rode. Alexander thought about the council and the stone he had swallowed and the pebbles in his pocket. He wondered about their domineering voices and the dismissiveness they displayed towards Washington. He thought about how Washington had said that it was unusual, or not normal, for stone fae to take real bodies, and that Washington did so largely as a step for him to be able to accomplish this task of winning the war and being part of human society. He thought about the impossible stone ceilings and the jagged nails of rock that hung from the ceiling and stuck from the floor, with their strange holes and mystery glows. There had been bridges from one stone to another. 

He thought about his Wreck, and the things that had twisted his fate so. 

He watched the back of Washington. The general had always been a talented rider. Was that because he was an otherworldly thing? Did Blueskin like him more, somehow, because of what he was? Or was it something despite? Or was it only unrelated? 

He thought about Washington laboring under two different councils, neither of which seemed to understand his struggles. Dealing with Congress was hard enough; certainly Alexander knew that. But this second group, which he apparently maintained great distant from otherwise on a regular basis, if they had to come to Mount Vernon to see them…

Worse, Washington labored more-or-less alone. Sure, there was the otygaruth, but that was not really a person, was it? Pierre, at least, had the strong inclination to stay away. Alexander knew what it was like to labor alone. He thought of looking out of the shipping company windows, the only man - boy - in the office. He had that job more out of pity than otherwise and everyone knew it. 

“Your Excellency,” he said. 

Washington looked over him. 

“Do you ever wish you could tell the others about everything?” 

“The other generals?” 

Alexander nodded. Washington made a thoughtful noise and turned back towards the road. 

“I hope I do not overstep,” he said, quick, giving his horse a nudge to catch up with Washington’s pace, which had increased. 

“Not overstepping has always been such a priority of yours,” Washington replied, his voice dry. He did not look back as he spoke. 

“Well, you can make me shut up anyone you want, can you not?” he challenged, “You can fill my mouth with dust. You’ve done it before.” 

“And I have not, have I?” 

Alexander had to settle into silence to concentrate on the pace, which was now closer to a gallop than the quick trot they had been before. There were many ways to shut a man up, he thought to himself, watching Washington’s bowed back, his weight held by his stirrups, half-standing in his saddle for more speed. Washington looked quickly over at him, a flash of pale skin and blue eyes and glittering slate from nowhere, and then snapped his reigns. Alexander had to cover his mouth to protect himself from the cloud of dust, and when he looked up the general seemed to be far in the distance of the plain. 

Washington had dismounted when Alexander caught up to him a couple of minutes later. Blueskin was meandering along a patch of grass, flankings heaving in between his breaths. 

“If it was a sensitive question,” Alexander hissed, dropping from the saddle, “You could have merely said so.” 

“There are so many things I cannot do, Colonel,” Washington said, watching Blueskin with a contemplative look on his face. “And so many things that I have learned, and so many things that I did not know I wished to do and cannot. Riding a horse is a spectacular thing, do you know? As you perhaps can imagine, stone fae have nothing like it. To us, there is only one form of transit - through stone, and largely instantaneous. It is not a thing considered in any significant way. To come to this world and learn about physical exertion, and boats, and carriages, and horses…” He shook his his head. “And in fact everything I do must be in the nature of this cause. I cannot merely become a horse racer, which I might like. Or perhaps I would be a ship captain. Do you know that I tried to go into the Royal Navy, and my mother did not permit it?”

Alexander took a gulp from the canteen that the house steward had given him. “No, sir,” he said, because he was clearly obligated to do so, “Although you will permit me to wonder: was that intended, that she deny you? And that she was your mother - she is not really your mother, you know. You lied to her and said you were her son.” It came out harsher than he intended. 

“There is a very technical explanation about how she is, in a particular fashion, my mother, but unfortunately we do not have the time or the runework to explain it,” Washington replied, as mild as ever, “And no, it was not intended she deny me. This is before the revolution was conceptualized, even from the beginning. I was grateful when the revolution began to form that I was not a Navy officer, but not until that. But the point of this story is that the human experience is so utterly different from the fae experience that it has taken me most of my human lifespan to understand basic concepts and pretend I find them unremarkable. For all the strength I possess as fae, there is no horse riding or gardening. And instead I am running this damn war.” 

He watched Washington pull himself back into Blueskin’s saddle with his characteristic ease. He drew pale fingers through Blueskin’s mane. Alexander heard the sigh leave his lips. 

Even without his fae strength, Washington had always been impressive. He was tall and broad-shouldered with steely eyes and powerful legs. Yet, Alexander had definitely been witness to moments when Washington seemed tiny in comparison to the weight of his task. For all his impressiveness, he was just one man, fae or otherwise. For all his reputation and victories and endeavors, there were failures. He knew the doubts Washington suffered under and the true lacks in his life - separated from his wife, away from his estate. 

Washington was greater than ever. Along with that, he was far away from anything like him, and the world he pretended to be a part of was completely alien to everything his true self had learned. Alexander tried to imagine what it would be like, if he was forced to be something so completely different from his true self. He could barely manage to be an armyman sometimes, and that was exactly what he wanted. 

“Yes, to your question,” Washington said, looking back over at him as he climbed into his own saddle, “I think Henry in particular would have many good questions, like you have. And I think John - Sullivan - would be amazed. I would selfishly like the look on the Comte’s face. But I am bound in the same way you are, of exposing what I am; in that way I have long been just as isolated as you feel you have become.” 

He thought of the frown John Laurens gave to him when he had not spoken about what bothered him. He thought about how it had felt, to be trying to concentrate on work when he knew that so much laid behind it. He thought about laying away in the bed and feeling the pebbles that he left in the drawer because he did not have any pockets in his sleepshift. 

Could it only have been a month or two or three that all of this had happened? It seemed impossible that all the questions could have appeared so quickly. He could not laugh as easily with the aides; they had all been so honest with another, and complained about their secrets, and suddenly he could not do so, not without the massive claws of the hunter coming after him -- 

Yes, it had been isolating. He did not deny, that it had ached. He would have to come up with something to say about this excursion that would not be the truth. They would know it was not the truth; he was not a particularly good liar. The other aides would be angry that he hid something from them, that was not some strict military matter. 

The other aides had not answered his questions, though. Washington had answered his questions, in his roundabout stone way. Washington had helped him learn more about who he was and how he came to be the way that he was. Washington had protected him twice over from the stone council, and brought him Below. Was it only for Washington’s own gains, or had he tried to help Alexander, in his way? 

He had gone on impossible adventure and stared down horrifying monsters and learned that bureaucracy was not only a human trait. 

“I am not completely isolated,” Alexander said, “I have you, sir.” 

Washington had clearly not been expecting that. He blinked in surprise, grey brows furrowing. Then he slowed his pace until their horsed trotted next to one another. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “You do have me, it seems. And I suppose then I have you?” 

Despite that there had been strange lies along the way, and hidden information, and Washington had given a bit of himself for Alexander to swallow -- 

\-- it was not all that different from all their other trappings, was it? Did Washington’s order not require his obedience, swallowed magic or no swallowed magic? Was the cause not all important, more than his life, no matter the ulterior motives? 

“Yes, sir,” Alexander said, and gave a quick little salute, “You do have me.” 

Something in his sense rumbled about Washington. The humming magic that Washington changed. Became firmer. Tempered, Alexander thought, like steel. Could you temper slate? 

“We should hurry back,” Washington said, “We have wasted too much time already, meandering down the road like this. You will shout, if I leave you too far behind?” 

The feeling of Washington’s tempering boosted his own mood. He tried to edit his own aura, make it brighter. “With all due respect, sir,” he said, with a grin, “You cannot lose me no matter how hard to try.” 

Washington chuckled a little chuckle, and then he took off like a bolt down the road.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the middle of the night he was woken by something digging through the ground beneath him. 
> 
> It must have been impossibly massive, for him to feel it while it was in his bed. It was huge, like -- like a cannon, or some kind or mortar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this photoset](https://iniquiticity.tumblr.com/post/185193348684/sosuperawesome-crystal-crowns-owisteria-on) forced me to post this chapter.

When they returned the camp was in some distress. Washington’s lifeguard had gotten back before them - perhaps they had left before Washington had left, Alexander thought - and they had been in a minor panic when they found no general in camp. So for Washington to appear, having splashed his face with water to remove the sweat from the fastest ride Alexander had ever taken, set them all off in a frenzy of muted chastisement and also celebration. 

There was other good news too, about Lafayette’s forward brigade, and the French, and some intercepted communication that suggested confusion within the British ranks. 

It was strange to hear good news, Alexander thought. Only after the impromptu celebration of Washington being alive did he remember the strangeness of them running off during the war, in comparison to all of his secret strangeness. No one else knew the latter, which overwhelmed all of it for him; for them the former was the point of confusion. It seemed so strange, to think so differently. His priorities, still the same, had become warped somewhere. 

“What secret mission was that about?” Tilghman asked him, as he was trying to get all his aide’s belongings back together, “No one else got four days at the general’s estate. Did you see much of it? I hear he has hundreds of acres of tobacco. Perhaps you could convince him to free those poor souls?” 

“The general is an accomplished arborist, is he not?” Harrison said, “I presume there were many beautiful flowering trees. Did he point out any exotic clippings he has to you?”

It seemed like too few voices. He looked up from one disorganized pile and saw John watching him with a frown. John looked away after they made eye contact, back to whatever he was writing. 

He wondered if Washington had this, with his growing familiarity with this world. Did Washington have stone fae friends that it seemed like he had torn away from because of this task he had now? Did they look at him with resentment? A moment prior and he had decided perhaps it was not so bad, to be a witch, because Washington was on his side. But with John not making eye contact with him now, and he was sure it was going to be worse…

“The estate is quite beautiful,” Alexander said, “Although admittedly we mostly talked about the war, and nothing exciting of note even. He did show me some of his holdings, and I asked him about his people in bondage, but..” A frown, and a real one, this time. “He is stubborn about it.” 

“Just talking about the war when he personally invites you?” Tilghman gave him a skeptical eyebrow. 

You would not even believe me if I told you, he thought. 

“Nothing of note otherwise,” he said. 

“Alexander is too deep in the general’s confidence to have interest in sharing any of their secret meetings with us, sirs,” John said, and the acid in his voice stung, “It is hardly worth asking, I imagine.” 

“Jack, be less unkind,” Harrison said, looking over at John and frowning, “We should not deny our friendship because Alexander prefers to keep more to himself. We are his friends.” 

John looked up and sighed. “Sorry, Ham,” he said “It is only that I cannot help but think that something important has happened to you, and I cannot fathom why you would not share it. I am happy that you are more in the general’s confidence, of course, because I know that is the thing you yearn for, because of your circumstances. I only wish you could be less withdrawn about it.” 

Alexander stood from the mess of his desk and walked over to John. He had shared everything with Laurens for years; certainly he would have been equally hurt if John had withheld something as massive as this from him. “I wish I could explain,” he said, and he tried to feel for the seabird with his sense, “But I am prohibited from doing so. There are -- restrictions.” No talons yet, so he pushed. “The general and I have shared a secret that would bring us both incredible danger for us to expose, even to you, my friends.” 

Would it not be wonderful, to tell them? To hear John and Tench’s opinions on all the insanity, and listen to their speculations on the voids in front of him, and how the witch Dinwiddie and the stone fae had known Washington would come into his confidence? 

There were huge wings beating in back of his sense. The seabird felt his urgency and hovered close in his chest, like a massive shadow. 

“I apologize,” he said, and the thing left. “But it must remain between us.” 

“It is what it is,” John said, and sighed again, “At least you are back so we can all stop trying to do your work of six men.” Then, lighter, “ If you would stop deserting us at these critical junctions when we are trying to coordinate eight different generals, only half of them speak do not speak English, and some of them speak such terrible English you wish they would only speak French?” 

Alexander chuckled at that, a little forced. At least John was trying to see past the secret so massive that Alexander was not even sure he himself could see past it. At least Tench had come to his aide in this way. 

“Oh, I know you could all do without me. You are all almost as capable of me.” 

Harrison rolled his eyes. “Of course. We could never be your true equal.” 

“As long as you know,” he teased, and sat down at his desk, resuming his sorting. 

That night he snuck in three hours of sleep and stood in the field in the wee hours of the morning with his shoes off trying to move the earth below his feet. 

He knew instantly something about the stone council or perhaps the new and improved bit of Washington he swallowed had made him more attuned to the earth. When he reached it seemed so much huger than the pebbles for obvious reasons. It was like trying to roll a cannon up a hill. His will hit some impossible wall and moved no further. But at least he could reach and see and feel the wall - that was a first step. 

He practiced feeling the wall of the earth’s power all the time when they marched south. That, at least, he could do while working or writing or delivering messages or waiting for something else. He got discovered an ingenious strategy, which was that if he kept dirt in his feet he could use it to reach, albeit mutedly, into the ground. It was like practicing while weighted down; it became easier and easier to extend his consciousness into the earth while he was barefoot. 

He practiced with new pebbles, too. Now, he could not only just vibrate them in his pocket, but could turn them to dust, too, if he tried. He could harmonize with them somehow, that was the only way to explain it. There was a hum in them and if he struck the right note they turned to sand in hand. He practiced in little circles on the ground too, until he could make the earth hum just enough that he felt the eyes of the hunter seabird on him. With practice he could push the hum in any direction, like a spear. 

In the middle of the night he was woken by something digging through the ground beneath him. 

It must have been impossibly massive, for him to feel it while it was in his bed. It was huge, like -- like a cannon, or some kind or mortar.

It was massive and quick and it moved towards the camp, unerring. 

Panic stuck in his throat. Some kind of attack? Some fae or witch that wanted to strike him or Washington down? Some Tory witch that would put the whole army in a sinkhole? Some massive monster pet set on them like an attack dog? 

There was no time to alert Washington about it. He could only fight back, jumping over John’s body and hearing him grunt in confusion at the sound of Alexander’s bare feet hitting the wood boards of the ground. With his feet in the ground it was even louder now, and coming towards them in a hurry; Alexander took a gulp of air to suppress his fear at the monster and ran outside. The grass warm was under his toes and the earth felt like home. 

He focused on the feeling of the enemy. It felt like boring a massive tunnel towards him. Deep, too - no human could get so deep. 

He thought about the pebbles and the earth and the vibrating hum of it. He took a deep breath. He had never sent his magic through the spear of the earth this fast, at something. It had always been practice. Of course it had always been practice with his rifle before, and then… 

Then. 

He focused his magic under his feet and sent it spiraling into the ground. It was less terrifying in that instance; the ground was home, calm and silent, and even at the same time there was the hum, and there was the sound of animals in fields and men walking around and carts and horses and the creak of the pressure of buildings above it. If he focused he could feel the earthworms and the voles that lived there. 

He coalesced the magic. It was easy to imagine as a spear. It was his will and everything that remained from the ragged scar of fae magic and witch suppression and whatever his past had been. It was the anger of not knowing and the rage at learning that something had been a lie. 

He cocked the spear like a slingshot and sent it towards the racing attack. The spear struck it, and he heard the thing cry out like it was alive. 

_General! Something faeborne struck me!_ It rumbled through the earth. 

Could the voice had been familiar? That seemed impossible, and at the same time there was a tinge of something he recognized. He had never heard anyone else speak in stone before. Washington, and the stone council. Pierre had not - Pierre had been scared by the thought of stone fae. 

_I felt the attack. Are you damaged?_ Washington, talking back to it. Washington did not seem alarmed. Could this be an ally?

The thing called Washington ‘general.’ Certainly an enemy outside the war would have not done so. He inquired upon the thing Alexander had hit if it was injured. 

Had Alexander struck some secret ally he had not known about? The thought struck in his throat, and he looked back towards the headquarters, where Washington’s office window was lit with a candle. 

_I am more surprised than injured, but what could have done it? Is this the fae from Ham’s memory?_

The secret thing called him Ham. Only a few people called him Ham. Did he know the thing, already? The thing certainly sounded like it knew him, at least. Somehow it was even more unsettling to think of mysterious secret friends boring through the earth. 

The thing knew about his memory - knew about the fae and the wizard that had damaged him. How could it know? Washington must have told it, and that caused no shortage of rage within him. He grit his teeth up at the window; only his urge to eavesdrop stopped him from turning around and storming back inside to be angry. How dare he share Alexander’s past, when he had just learned it? How c dare the general divulge his secret so carelessly, when he had tried to hard to keep it hidden, and so many others had as well? 

A beat, while he tried to wrestle with his anger. A thought struck him: Washington must have known that Alexander could hear the conversation, and yet he did not divulge that. Did he want Alexander to hear? He must have. 

Alexander's head spun. Washington's stone voice grounded him. _I suspect my enemy would not have opened with anything less than it’s full strength. Nonetheless, I will investigate; perhaps it is best, if you stay away from it. Are there any notable reports from the front?_

 _Two, sir._ The thing -- the thing had items to report from a front. There were so few fronts - Lafayette and Sullivan hurrying south, the remains of the other southern armies, the skirmishes with the natives. The thing was definitely in the army, which did make it an ally that Washington had hid from him, until this moment, when he must have let Alexander overhear and know. 

The thing spoke while Alexander desperately struggled to keep pace. _The first being that General Sullivan and I have made excellent progress and we are assisted by your most honorable ally, the pox. Our men, thanks to His Excellency’s most exquisite genius, are inoculated. The Tories are generally not._

“Sullivan and I?” Alexander whispered to himself. That certainly narrowed down the fronts. The thing was with Sullivan and Lafayette. The thing called itself Sullivan and I. 

The language did remind him of one particular person. The one person who would say something like Sullivan and I. There was only one person that could fit that qualifier ---

Sullivan and I. Who called him Ham. Who was definitely with Lafayette’s brigade. Who Washington had told about his Wreck. 

He felt the nausea rise in his stomach.

 _Hardly an ally,_ Washington replied, dry, while Alexander tried to stay calm in his voyeurism, _But I shall take the assistance given to me. The second?_

_I received a letter from Benedict Arnold. What should I do with it?_

Traitor, Alexander thought, the anger temporarily overtaking the shock and horror and confusion and acknowledgement his brain fought against. 

_Do not open it._ Washington’s stone voice was tense and sharp, like a cliff edge. Alexander heard it as much as he felt it, like stepping on jagged glass. _Send it back. The only part of him to be acknowledged is the boot he was shot in at Saratoga._

 _You like his boot so much more than mine, and I was just as sufficiently shot,_ teased the voice, and oh, it had to be, and he wanted to throw up. In a strange distant way he realized it was not all that unlikely; after all, it was extremely strange for impossibly rich French nobles to just show up wanting nothing and not needing to be paid but willing to put down everything for Washington, wasn’t it? 

He could not hold himself back anymore. He reached down into the Earth and pushed his thoughts into the spear of his power and used the rudimentary knowledge and the whole power of his will. 

_Lafayette?_ Alexander thought, into the ground.


End file.
